Word: pagans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What do you fear? Midterms. Darkness. Death. Seventeen students and community members faced these fears at the MIT Pagan Students’ Group (PSG) annual Samhain ritual at MIT Chapel on Sunday night. The Samhain ritual celebrates the Celtic New Year by commemorating the dead while celebrating new life. Though Samhain is a pagan ritual, attendees were not all strict pagans. “I really like paganism and I enjoy hanging out with pagans. My own religion is something I make up myself out of many things,” says participant Jonas Roy, a 23-year-old Boston...
...Great saints have great struggles: that is what makes them great. Mother Teresa and those like her do not run on adrenaline, they run on obedience to God. Our modern pagan society searches continually for personal meaning, which usually translates to emotional significance. The Way of the Cross is to renounce emotions for actions. We judge ourselves on our feelings. God judges us on our actions. The marvel is not that Teresa understood herself (whatever that may mean) but that she kept going when all the ordinary human blandishments and self-deceptions were removed. Jim Douglas, Sydney...
...museum show comprised over 300 pieces - including a white lace dress that Valentino designed while working as a 19-year-old assistant to the Paris couturier Jean Desses - displayed as if in a pagan ritual, culminating at an ancient altar. The first room, all elaborately beaded dresses and coats, suggested the "seed" of an idea. That progressed to a "Peace" dress - white, with the word peace embroidered all over it - which Valentino had designed during the Gulf War. Two dozen white dresses are arranged as if marching toward the altar, surrounded by a "chorus" of dresses in the designer...
...political convenience, this view of Shi'ites solidified into institutionalized prejudice. Sunnis likened reverence for the Prophet's bloodline and the Shi'ites' fondness for portraits of some of the Imams to the sin of idolatry. Shi'ite rituals, especially the self-flagellation during Ashura, were derided as pagan. Many rulers forbade such ceremonies, fearing that large gatherings would quickly turn into political uprisings. (Ashura was banned during most of Saddam Hussein's rule and resumed only after his downfall in 2003.) "For Shi'ites, Sunni rule has been like living under apartheid," says Vali Nasr, senior fellow...
Mather was blazing trails. He was also (indirectly involved in) burning witches. In 1684, he published “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providence,” which, among other things, defended the existence of those pagan priestesses. Although he would later question the methods of the witch trials, he would never denounce them...