Un message de la Présidente

Dear Colleagues,

I am sure you would like to join me in offering heartfelt thanks to the members of the Executive Committee who completed their period of office last summer. Pauline Allen, Michael Slusser, Hans Christof Brenneke and Samuel Rubenson presided over something of a renaissance in the life and work of AIEP. Due to their immense hard work and dedication the Association is now in robust good health, both in terms of membership and financial security. Together they laid very firm foundations for the new executive, elected at the Oxford Patristics Conference in 2007, to continue the work of the Association in promoting the study of Christian antiquity.

Since the Oxford Conference, and with the indispensable help of our National Correspondents, Lorenzo Perrone, the new General Secretary, has completed preparation of the Bulletin in which you will be reading this message, and of the bi-annual Annuaire; Theodore de Bruyn, Vice President, has been working on a new website for the Association which we hope will be up and running soon (www.aiep-iaps.org); Benoît Gain, Vice President, has dealt with the somewhat complicated legal and archival aspects of the association; Samuel Rubenson, General Treasurer, has continued his extraordinary work in consolidating and improving the collection of dues on which the work of the association depends.

At our annual meeting in Rome in May 2008 we were delighted to welcome eight new National Correspondents (Miguel Herero de Jauregui (Spain); Tina Dolidze (Georgia); Marianne Saghy (Hungary); Janet Rutherford (Ireland); Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony (Israel); Leszek Misiarczyk (Poland); Lenka Karfikova (Czechoslovakia); Vladimir Cvetkovic (Serbia). We are very grateful indeed to them for their willingness to take on this important role and look forward to future cooperation.  We also formally accepted 52 new applications for membership. As the association grows we are conscious that we need National Correspondents in areas hitherto unrepresented: Russia, South America (especially Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brasil), South Africa, China. If anyone has contacts in these areas, who they think might be interested in joining or representing the association, then we would be very pleased to hear from them.

Finally, we are conscious of the challenges faced by younger scholars and researchers who are at the beginning of their career. We would be grateful if you could encourage any who you know or supervise to consider joining the association and to let us know of any ways in which the association might be able to assist them. They are the future!

Carol Harrison