Word: rite
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Koetsu sometimes worked with potters and sometimes commissioned pieces from them; his approval became a signature of authorship. His passion was tea bowls - the "active," intimately handled objects of a ceremony that, imported from China, had been turned by its first Japanese grandmaster, Sen No Rikyu, into a cultural rite linked to Zen Buddhism. The "way of tea" had become an essential part of the samurai-influenced code of upper Japanese behavior. It connoted roughness, naturalness and - at its origins, at least - lack of pretension. In it, aesthetics and morality were conjoined, under the sign of severe restraint...
...rite of baptism for the dead, ancestors are posthumously given a physical baptism by water...
Most religions acknowledge that humans can be possessed by what exorcism chronicler Malachi Martin called "personal and intelligent evil," and most prescribe measures to win back the victim. Jesus cast out demons on six occasions; a transdenominational echo of the rite is found in Christian godparents' promise that their godchild will renounce the devil and all his works and ways. For centuries every Roman Catholic priest's ordination included an explicit induction into the Order of the Exorcist...
...century of Freudian psychology and medical progress was harsh on exorcism. Conditions previously thought diabolical, such as Tourette's syndrome, proved medically treatable. In the wake of Vatican II, many American Catholics "wanted to restrict things to only a scientific way of knowing" and shied away from the rite's supernatural literalism, says the Rev. Kazimierz Kowalski, an exorcist in Manhattan. Notes the Rev. James LeBar, who took up the work in 1989: "The whole thing kind of went down to embers...
...York appointed four archdiocesan exorcists. In an average year, they investigate some 350 cases and perform 10 to 15 exorcisms. Last year Chicago's Francis Cardinal George appointed the first official exorcist in his diocese's 160-year history. Several months earlier, the Vatican had revised the Rite of Exorcism. It eliminated physical descriptions of Satan and such honorifics as the "Father of Lies," but it also vigorously affirmed the church's power to banish him using God's name, holy water, the sign of the cross and readings from Scripture. An exorcists' convention in Rome in July attracted...