Word: rite
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much for caution. In test-happy America, the SAT has since become a kind of academic icon and a national rite of passage for college-bound high school students. Every year more than 1.3 million of them take the 2-hr., 30-min. multiple-choice exam, which is intended to measure students' reasoning skills, math and verbal, as well as their readiness for college. High SAT scores -- perfection is 800 on each half of the exam -- have acquired the cachet of quality. Suburbs lure prospective home buyers by touting the SAT records of their high schools' graduates. Colleges boast...
...Somalian woman who gave this account was describing a rite undergone by more than 80 million African women. Female circumcision -- the mutilation of the external genital organs -- is a centuries-old rite of passage, intended to ensure that young women become desirable wives. It frequently causes life- threatening blood loss and infection. It can also lead to painful intercourse, infertility and difficult childbirth. While often erroneously linked to Islamic scripture, it is not mandated by any religion and is practiced by people of many faiths in some two dozen black African nations, Egypt and the Sudan...
...ensuing events, the Priest attempts to play voyeur, suggesting that watching the couple copulate will legitimate the pregnancy in the eyes of the Church. Man turns the tables, however, when he suggests that the priest perform the sexual rite. Since the priest "only wishes to help," he has sex with the Woman, affirming that "[i]t is entirely legal." Even the act of sex is cast in his narrow-minded yet perverse religiosity. "To make of that She a knowable her, but at the same time transubstantiate the self...I've got the sweet taste of trinities in my mouth...
...implacable and bloodthirsty conservatism of Aztec art that forces itself on you first, even in the Met's galleries, so far from the real context of the sacrificial pyramids and the thousands of other effigies that make up its body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice...
...small part, by a willingness to cause the deaths of others. After the U.S. invasion of Panama, President Bush exulted that no one could call him "timid"; he was at last a "macho man." The press, in even more primal language, hailed him for succeeding in an "initiation rite" by demonstrating his "willingness to shed blood...