Kirjahaku

The cradle of the Church of the East was in Mesopotamia (between the Tigris and the Euphrates), where it developed its first centre at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then the capital of the great Persian Empire and today an archaeological site to the south of Baghdad. From the very beginnings of Christianity until the fourteenth century, this Church experienced a remarkable expansion in Asia, its missionaries carrying the Gospel from Persia to India, via the Persian Gulf, and even as far as China. The Church of the East reached China as early as the seventh century via Central Asia and the celebrated Silk Road that linked China to the Mediterranean world. Much later, in the late fourteenth century, the invasions of the Mongol conqueror, Timur Lang (Tamerlane), across Asia brought about a great decline of the Church of the East. Eventually, after the genocide suffered by Christians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, and the massacres that followed in Persia, the Church of the East and its people were on the verge of extinction. In 1940 the patriarchal seat was moved to Chicago (in the United States) and then in September 2015 to Erbil (in northern Iraq). Many of the faithful have left the Middle East and have formed diaspora communities throughout the world. The history of Christianity in the Middle East and well beyond, in Central and Eastern Asia, is very little known. In this book, the reader is invited to travel in time and space and undertake the fascinating discovery of a very ancient apostolic Church, the Church of the East, whose two-thousand year history constitutes an indispensable chapter in the history of the universal Church.

Christine Chaillot's book, The Traditional Teaching of the Ethiopian Orthodox T wahedo Church: Faith and Spirituality, presents a topic that is little - if at all - known outside Ethiopia, even in Christian circles. Moreover, it is a much neglected field in the wider study of African education. It is a teaching based on ancient texts and books, taught orally to the students who will become the future clergy and who will then share their knowledge with the faithful in Church life. The studies of the different disciplines are pursued at different schools and at different levels, in liturgy, theology with commentaries of books (Old and New Testaments, books of the Church fathers and monks) as well as composition of poems (qenes) and iconography. All this teaching presented in the present volume is deeply related to the faith and spirituality of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This teaching is a unique intangible cultural heritage. One wonders, however, what its future will be in the context of the modern educational methods and social attitudes that have evolved in Ethiopia over the last half-century.