National Greek Press Featuring Graduate Student Paul Melas

Graduate Student Paul Melas’ recent conference presentation on the monastic community of Mount Athos, Greece, was covered by the National Greek press * agency and a dozen other Greek news outlets. Melas’s intensive 18-month field research challenged the longstanding perception that the thousand-year-old monastic community is insulated from global networks and contemporary complex social problems– poverty, disease, marginalization, and oppression–, linking Greek Orthodox conceptions of spirit and the work of care to social life within and beyond the community. As ERT national news network reported, “the monastic state of Mount Athos as an isolated, closed society comes to be ‘disputed’, with strong arguments, by a new study on the monasteries of Mount Athos. The study reveals the diversity of social interactions occurring on the peninsula, as well as the various networks that connect the community and its members to the ‘outside world’.”

 

Continue to read their article here: ERT NEWS Paul Melas Various social dimensions inside and outside the monastic state of Mount Athos – ertnews.gr