Word: rite
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...reforms stirred little controversy until Tombalbaye ordered the revival of an ancient pagan tribal custom known as Yondo, a grueling initiation rite practiced by the Sara tribal groups of southern Chad. The ordeal -Tombalbaye himself underwent it as an adolescent-is known to involve floggings, facial scarring, mock burials, drugging, and ingeniously gruesome tests of stamina, like crawling naked through a nest of termites. Tribesmen who have been raised in the bush do not always survive the ritual, which suggested that it is even more difficult for urbanized Chadians to endure. When Tombalbaye decreed that high government officials, regardless...
...white musician's commitment to jazz, the ultimate concern, proposed that the sub-cultural attitudes that produced the music as a profound expression of human feelings, could be learned and need not be passed on as a secret blood rite. And Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made. The white jazz musician came to understand this attitude as a way of making music, and the intensity of his understanding produced the "great" white jazz musicians, and is producing them...
...maternity ward as the number of abortions in the area approaches the number of live births. Underused elementary schools are turned into bakeries or motels. Young people gather in Manhattan's Central Park to honor the "nonparents of the year" and celebrate their childlessness in a "non-fertility rite" complete with dancing...
...document said to be in the works at the Vatican is expected to broaden the conclave of papal electors to include others besides cardinals: probably patriarchs of the Eastern Rite churches and perhaps representatives of the international Synod of Bishops. What is more, the traditionally "secret" conclave may be somewhat more open, with the voting prelates no longer locked up in the Vatican for the duration of the balloting...
Freshman year is one long initiation rite. Its lesson, never fully learned and put aside, is that it is not easy to be a person at Harvard. But there are additional built-in features of the Harvard experience that mean that womanhood, on top of personhood, can be a complicating factor in making your peace with Harvard. Living with sexism is not an expectation that many of us bring to freshman registration. A consciousness of it tends to develop only gradually, checked ironically enough by such things as fear of failure, the love-it-or-leave-it dogma, the feeling...