Blood Revenge

Literature & Fiction

Thompson, Robert F.

Contemporary

AuthorHouse

Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of African and African-American Art at Yale University, has been working on this study of African-Atlantic altars for twenty-five years. Face of the Gods is based on fieldwork in both Africa and the Americas - in Mali, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, on the eastern part of the Atlantic, and in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Suriname, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, on the western. The book shows how the Africans and their descendants in the three continents worship not only before points of reverence, foci of sacrifice and prayer, but also, in certain areas, through sacred happening climaxed by possession. In the Afro-Atlantic world the concept "altar" is double: fixed (tree, fire, stone, dais) and moving (ring shouts, dancing, handclapping, circling, ecstasy), leading ultimately to visitation by healing spirits under God. Face of the Gods is an introduction, the first in any language, to a brand-new field in art history: the comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars. Tracing icons and philosophies in altar-making from major African civilizations to the Americas, the book restores many works of art, long considered in isolation from each other, to their original constellating power. Face of the Gods is richly illustrated with full-color plates. The book opens with the fire altars of the foraging Mbuti, of the Ituri Forest in northeastern Zaire, and of the San, of Namibia. Next it describes minkisi, the extraordinary medicines of God still made in Kongo and the Kongo-influenced civilizations of Central Africa. The minkisi tradition, Thompson shows, traveled intact acrossthe Atlantic. In Havana as in the Bronx, it expands in altars to Afro-Cuban deities such as Sarabanda, its complex symbolic constructions sometimes artfully contained in as small and secret a place as an apartment closet. Likewise derived from Kongo belief are Brazilian tree-alta

Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Museum for African Art

Intended for the interested general reader as well as for persons with informed acquaintance with the life and work of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (d. 1944), this book provides an introduction to the "layers" of Bulgakov’s multi-dimensional sophiology. Beyond this, the text proposes this sophiology as a useful interpretive lens for engaging with the range of contemporary concerns, both local and global, in trans-disciplinary ways. All this is done with reference to the best of recent English-language Bulgakov scholarship up through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The late Orthodox spiritual writer, Philip Sherrard, wrote about "a single unified science." Such a science can only exist insofar as it is rooted in the wisdom/glory of God. Bulgakovian sophiology is therefore approached, in this study, from within a larger context than is usually accorded to it. This approach includes reference to what is sometime called The Great Tradition or the perennial wisdom. It is suggested that Bulgakov is best thought of as a visionary Christian writer and Christian humanist, and that his sophiology will continue to be relevant into the future because it is, in essence, a Christian expression of the unitive vision which both acknowledges and transcends modern (and postmodern) discernment of "difference." Within the context of Christian Orthodoxy, Bulgakov’s sophiology connects with the contemporary search for a more open, comprehensive, and progressive Orthodoxy rooted in liturgical practice and patristic spirituality. It is also suggested that sophiology, more broadly, is best understood as a particular approach, as opposed to a specific method, to understanding and addressing resistances (within ourselves) to the reign of heaven in the world today and in the years to come. As one student of Fr. Bulgakov is said to have characterized his theology/sophiology--it is "nothing but the experience of the Kingdom of God!" A companion volume to this text, The Anthropocosmic Vision: For a New Dialogic Civilization, was published in September 2017. The focus of the companion volume is humanity and its possible futures in light of Holy Wisdom. A Perennials Study Group publication

From Glory to Glory: The Sophianic Vision of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov

Religion & Spirituality

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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Books by Thompson, Robert F.