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The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity
Christoph Baumer is one of the very few Westerners to have visited many of the most important Assyrian sites, and has written the only comprehensive history of the "Nestorian" (or Apostolic Assyrian) Church, which now fights for survival in its country of origin, Iraq. He traces its apostolic beginnings to the present day, and discusses the Church's theology, christology and uniquely vigorous spirituality. He analyzes the Church's turbulent relationship with other Christian chuches and its dialogue with neighboring world religions such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism. Richly illustrated with maps and over 150 full-color photographs, the book will be essential reading for those interested in a fascinating but neglected Christian community which has profoundly shaped the history of civilization in both East and West. .
Price: $36.00
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Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, including a summer in the Upper Karun region and a visit to the Nestorian rayahs: Volume 1
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Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, including a summer in the Upper Karun region and a visit to the Nestorian rayahs: Volume 2
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The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916
Western readers have yet to come to terms with the fact that during much of our history very little was ever "known" about China. There was never any lack of information from missionaries and travelers and traders But what kind of information was it? What kind of knowledge was obtainable via the lenses of religious intolerance, colonial ambition, or Eurocentrism? Travel accounts, Jesuit letter-books, or embassy narratives can sometimes seem comparatively dispassionate, even ethnographic, but one is repeatedly struck by a remarkable vagueness when it comes to discussions of the foreign, and such discussions become buried in a huge mélange of fact and fiction that is then collected, retold, or reintegrated in innumerable ways. The thesis of this book is that when Westerners discussed the Nestorian monument they were not really talking about China at all. The stone served as a kind of screen onto which they could project their own self-image and this is what they were looking at, not China. The stone came to represent the empire and its history for many Western readers, but only because it was seen as a tiny bit of the West that was already there. This is the first detailed study in English of the Western reception of the monument since its discovery in Xi'an in 1625. It will be essential reading for those interested in East Asian colonialism, in the vagaries of cross-cultural contact between East and West, and in the way in which, from the very beginning of the period of Western presence in China, the empire was viewed as little more than an extension of European prejudices about the superiority of its own cultures, religions, and conceptual paradigms..
Price: $40.07
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Fever & Thirst: A Missionary Doctor Amid the Christian Tribes of Kurdistan
The first Americans to work with the people of the Middle East were neither spies nor soldiers They were, in fact, teachers, printers, and missionaries, of whom one was a country doctor from Utica, New York. In June of 1835, Asahel Grant, M.D., and his bride Judith, sailed from Boston, to heal the sick and save the world. Their destination was the town of Urmia, in Northwest Iran, and their intended flock, the Nestorian Christians, who lived there, and in the mountains of Hakkari, across the border in Ottoman Kurdistan. Into the next eight years, Grant packed ten lifetimes' worth of danger, heartbreak, and exertion. He traversed deserts and glaciers, forded rivers, learned fluent Turkish and Syriac, opened schools, tended the sick and dying, confronted bandits, broke bread with thieves and murderers, and narrowly escaped death from drowning, malaria, cholera, influenza, mercury poisoning, dysentery, hypothermia, and assassination. In one year alone he lost three-fifths of his family (including Judith) to disease, was targeted for death by a mob, and nearly died by blizzard, drowning, and dysentery. Yet, by the time his shattered body gave out, there was no one in the mountains who did not know his name and his legend, and thirty years later, Kurds, Nestorians, Jews, and Yezidis still spoke of "Hakim Grant" with reverence. Grant was a walking contradiction: a saint who ruined his health with his own medicine, and an apolitical man whose very existence bristled with political import. In 1841, amid this whirlwind of a life, he became a best-selling author with his book "The Nestorians: Or, The Lost Tribes". Grant and three of his colleagues are buried in Mosul, where he died in 1844 at the age of 36..
Price: $20.46
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Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford Early Christian Studies)
What were the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril of Alexandria was elevated to canonical status while his opponent, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic? In contrast to previous scholarship, Susan Wessel concludes that Cyril's success in being elevated to orthodox status was not simply a political accomplishment based on political alliances he had fashioned as opportunity arose. Nor was it a dogmatic victory, based on the clarity and orthodoxy of Cyril's doctrinal claims. Instead, it was his strategy in identifying himself with the orthodoxy of the former bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in his victory over Arianism, in borrowing Athanasius' interpretive methods, and in skilfully using the tropes and figures of the second sophistic that made Cyril a saint in the Greek and Coptic Orthodox Churches..
Price: $189.83
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