Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...night last week and burned a great disfiguring M into the carefully tended turf of Thompson Stadium. No one got too fired up. The lacrosse game coming up between Navy and Maryland was sure to be a minor riot, anyway, and the predawn blaze seemed almost a proper ritual. Rules, referees and two centuries of civilization have failed to temper the spirited spring sport that white men learned from the American Indian...
...Equatorial Africa. The church's curving Gothic arch resembled the silhouette of an outsized mud hut, and its lofty vaults and arches were modeled after palm trees. The altar was made of two rough boulders topped by a monolith and the simple carved benches resembled witch doctors' ritual chairs. With its glassless windows admitting light and air and its roof covered with brilliant emerald tiles, the church seemed like a cool spot in the jungle...
...Clerastianism: That heresy which accepts the supremacy of the clergy in family affairs. Members of the sect submit their infants to ceremonial headwetting while placing the tongue in a ritual position in the cheek, precede their nuptial rites by ancient formulae to which they make mental reservations, and bury their ancestors only after a ceremony which they believe will ensure respectability if not immortality...
...thrill of discovery which I have experienced in the course of my readings of Mr. Amory's Lieder and his Prothalamium. I find them the most exquisite and successful achievements in the magazine. That the Lieder have probed so centrally into a relationship, that the Prothalamium attains a ritual by means of manifold yet consistently intense gestures-and that all this is done with a subtlety of technique which is characterized by its own humility, I find immensely moving...
...anything could be stickier than some of the soap operas, but religion has outdone even Lever Brothers. The difficult art of Christian family life is reduced to little moralisms and pleasantries, and to the cheerful conclusion that it pays in the end . . . Religion is introduced as a fragment of ritual, or a moralistic cliche, or an offstage voice quoting Scripture in a mellifluous voice...