The first thing you should know is that Abyssinia was located in Ethiopia with its capital in Addis Ababa, and Abyssinia included countries such as Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya, all of this area was called Abyssinia, and it was the third most powerful kingdom on earth after the Romans and Persians....
👨🎓 We wish Paulo Alexandre Alves the best of luck as he defends his doctoral thesis on the episcopate in the Portuguese Constitutional Monarchy tomorrow, 13 March.
Another informative piece by Joshua J. Mark (one of my sources for "Women in the Ancient World"). Also, ever wonder where #Christianity got some of their ideas about the #afterlife? Pretty much, they took what they wanted (or what was popular), then banned the Rites.
"The #RitesOfEleusis, or the Eleusinian Mysteries, were the secret rituals of the mystery school of #Eleusis and were observed regularly from c. 1600 BCE - 392 CE. Exactly what this mystic ritual was no one knows; but why the ancient Greeks participated in it can be understood by the testimonials of the initiated.
"The Eleusinian Mysteries, held each year at Eleusis, Greece, fourteen miles northwest of Athens, were so important to the Greeks that, until the arrival of the Romans, The Sacred Way (the road from Athens to Eleusis) was the only road, not a goat path, in all of central Greece. The mysteries celebrated the story of Demeter and #Persephone but, as the initiated were sworn to secrecy on pain of death as to the details of the ritual, we do not know what form these rituals took. We do know, though, that those who participated in the mysteries were forever changed for the better and that they no longer feared death.
"The rituals were based on a symbolic reading of the story of Demeter and Persephone and provided initiates with a vision of the afterlife so powerful that it changed the way they saw the world and their place in it. Participants were freed from a fear of death through the recognition that they were immortal souls temporarily in mortal bodies. In the same way that Persephone went down to the land of the dead and returned to that of the living each year, so would every human being die only to live again on another plane of existence or in another body."
The safest, richest, most stable, freest, and, by many counts, most moral countries in the world are secular, have a large percentage of their population not believing in God. One cavate they aren't forced into disbelief as in being communistic or capitalist as in USSR, Albania, Egypt, Turkey, etc
Hard to read this and not cheer for Luther. (That said, I tend to cheer for Luther in general, save for when he's being an ad hominem asshole which is admittedly not infrequently)
This is statue of Saint Bartholomew, an early Christian martyr who was allegedly skinned alive. Notice: that's not a robe that he’s holding. It's his dissected skin. This stunning statute is by the Italian sculptor Marco d’Agrate, c.1562.
I was chatting with a friend tonight about radicals within organized religion. The 1960s Latin American Liberation Theology movement came up, as did the Sister of the Immaculate Heart, the nuns features in the amazing documentary Rebel Hearts.
The trailer is just over a minute long, and I absolutely lose it at 0:48.
The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart marched at Selma in 1965 & the Women's March in 2018 + they've never stopped fighting for justice.
If you'd like to use Rebel Hearts about these radical nuns to teach with film in your classroom, my friends at Journeys in Film put together a free teaching guide for the film. (It's free for everyone, not just teachers.)
Abraha (www.trustpast.net)
The first thing you should know is that Abyssinia was located in Ethiopia with its capital in Addis Ababa, and Abyssinia included countries such as Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya, all of this area was called Abyssinia, and it was the third most powerful kingdom on earth after the Romans and Persians....