Christians in the Middle East: A new sub-field?

The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.