Word: rite
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...picturesque Japanese island of Ikitsuki, where the ways of farmers and fishermen die hard, two old men squat before a home altar and chant prayers carefully entrusted to them by their ancestors. The ritual is intense and moving. But something is askew. The rite is partly Buddhist, partly Christian. The language sounds odd, a sort of pidgin Latin. And what do the ancient prayers mean? One of the worshipers admits, "I don't understand a word of this...
...SURELY as January means the coming of exams, a new year meant the return of the CRR debate. Many students here--especially freshmen, most of whom were about six years old when the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities was born--may not know the significance of this annual campus rite. But the CRR is potentially important to all of us, as are the lessons of the committee's troubled history...
...other identifying marks covered, of course. Lintgen simply holds a disc flat in front of him, turning it slightly this way and that and peering along its grooves through his thick glasses. After a few seconds he calmly announces, as the case may be, ''Stravinsky's Rite of Spring," or "Strauss's Alpine Symphony," or "Janacek's Sinfonietta...
...cool brew in a warm tavern. Young gentlemen at the College of William and Mary in revolutionary Virginia drew up plans for a society of good fellowship and spirited debate. (Sample topic: "Whether Polygamy is a dictate of Nature or not.") They devised a secret handshake and an initiation rite. The group, in fact, might have ended up as just one more fraternity but for a sober motto-and philosophy-based on the Greek letters ΦBK : "love of wisdom the guide of life." The Virginia chapter collapsed after only five years, in 1781, but not before it had sent...
...ceremony took place at Patrick's Point State Park, and for the Yuroks, a small tribe of California Indians, it was an especially important rite. After years of anguished protest, they had finally recovered the bones of their ancestors, plundered by scientists and amateur collectors, and reburied them in sacred soil. But for many California scientists, especially archaeologists and anthropologists, the ceremony had a different meaning: it was the latest episode in a continuing battle over the right of researchers to study America's distant past...