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For a thousand years the Christians Chruch, EAst and West,shared a common artistic spirit that continued in the Eastlong after humanism had prevailed in the art of the West. Inthis book, Mahmound Zibawi explores that spirit as it it hasbeen manifested in four regions: Syria-Mesopotamia, Armenia,Egypt, and Ethiopia. By tracing tracing the political,religious, and cultural outlines of these regions, he showsthat the Christians communities of each were indeed a 'world' but a world of unending change. Time after time, these communities found themselves torn apart by doctrinalcontroversies, persecutions, political upheavals, foreignconquests. But through all the centuries, as the authorstresses, their religious art, 'images of eternity,'reflected the one primordial vision of EasternChristianity,that of the unseen face of God reflected in the many faces of transfigured humanity in a world redeemed and radiant. The more than 280 illustrations, 96 in color, amplydemonstrate that this art was universal and multi-cultural.Exchange and communion surmounted religious, racial,cultural, and political divisions: Jacobites and Melchitesdecorate one another's churches; Ethiopians and Armenianssettled in Jerusalem; Muslims and Christians shared a common desire to glorify the divine Transcendence.These Eastern Christian worlds and their religious art, much of it of surpassing beauty yet all but unknown to the general public, have much to say to humankind at the end of a tumultuous and tragic century. Rivalries, divisions, andhatreds are not the inevitable results of our differences.These differences can be the source of a spirit that sings asingle hymn of praise to the one God mirrored in humanity inall its transfigured diversity.
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