Journal index

The pastoral training and professional workshop named “Spirituality and Mission in the Church” held its conference titled “Spiritual Hunger 7.0” on March 2, 2023, at the Ráday House in Budapest. The topic of this was the problem of pastoral care. Márton Járay reported on the results of a survey conducted among Lutheran ministers in Hungary in his presentation titled “The Lost Shepherd - Lessons from a Pastoral Research”.

This paper discusses three Hebrew gratulatory poems from the corpus of so-called carmina gratulatoria hebraica composed by 17th century Hungarian peregrines in Franeker (Holland). It introduces the genre and context of this type of poems. As carmina gratulatoria represent a community oriented genre, they offer a wealth of information about their sociocultural setting, in our case the relations of the writer and his addressees, his education in and knowledge of Hebrew in Hungary and in the Netherlands, the writer’s skills of Hebrew and writing poetry. This is the first study of these Hebrew poems from the 17th century.

In the year 1859 the French Alphonse Esquiros made this remark in his itinerary: “Holland is one of the most religious countries of the earth; the Bible is really popular there.” In my lecture I outline the history of the personal and family reading of the Bible in the Netherlands during the last 5 centuries, including the current situation.Notable new research showed that in the Late Middle Ages in urban regions, in Holland as well, the Bible was spread in the national languages in wide circles of the society and was read among literate laymen. The Reformation built on this broadly recognisable interest or even hunger for the knowledge of the Bible. With the help of the newly discovered technique of printing and school teaching, and due to the fundamental reorientation of religious life through the Reformation – the Christian faith having only one source: the Bible – an intensive personal and family reading of the Bible began.