The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (568 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
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Coomaraswamy, Ananda
(1877–1947).
A philosopher of aesthetics, who worked from the basis of the history of art to develop a form of the ‘perennial philosophy’ (
philosophia perennis
). Treating art as an ‘affective expression of metaphysical theses’, he emphasized the inspirational. It is a form of knowledge with the power to effect transformation of being.
Cope
.
Christian
vestment
.
COPEC
(conference)
:
Copper Scroll
.
A document found at
Qumran
. It consists of an inventory of treasure, conjectured to be the treasure seized from the
Temple
before the Jewish revolt of 67 CE.
Coptic Church
(Arab.,
qib
, from Gk.,
Aigyptios
, ‘Egyptian’). The national Christian church of Egypt.
Its position under Islam has, however, always been difficult. There were occasional persecutions under the
khal
fas
, besides the legal disabilities imposed on non-Muslims as
dhimmis
. Many restrictions (e.g. on church building and publication) still exist.
The Coptic Church was a founder member of the World Council of Churches in 1948. Its vitality appears in its Sunday schools and in a recent repopulation of some of the ancient desert monasteries. The number of Copts in the 1976 census was given as 2.3 million, but Coptic leaders claim it is 5 million or more, and that the figures were falsified to serve the picture of Egypt as an Islamic state.
Coptic liturgies and ceremonial preserve some very archaic features. The traditional liturgical language is Coptic, although it gave way to Arabic as a spoken language as early as the 9th cent.
Corban
(Heb., ‘oblation’). An obligatory or free-will offering at the temple altar (Leviticus 1. 2, etc.).

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