Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ritual rarely varied. After an evening of movies in the Reichskanzlei, Adolf Hitler led his guests along a special path to an adjoining building. By flashlight he escorted them into the workroom of his personal architect, Albert Speer. There the Führer, throwing off his customary stiffness, often kept his guests until 3 a.m., describing every detail of the new Berlin that he and Speer were secretly designing...
...intergalactic missionary named Father John Carmody, visits a planet where the inhabitants are only dimly aware that they have souls at all. He then prcceeds to instruct them, in one breathtaking passage, in the basic principles of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and the ritual of the Last Supper. As Carmody's spaceship moves away from the planet, the agnostic ship commander chides him. What the priest has done in his effort to instruct, says the captain, is to lay the foundations for a mythology in which the missionary himself may well become...
...This family is Our Thing]." The sponsor then pricks his trigger finger and the trigger finger of the new member, holding both together to symbolize the mixing of blood. After swearing to hold the family above his religion, his country, and his wife and children, the inductee finishes the ritual. A picture of a saint or a religious card is placed in his cupped hands and ignited. As the paper burns, the inductee, together with his sponsor, proclaims: "If I ever violate this oath, may I burn as this paper...
...Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant,* were asked to give up many of their tribal cultural traditions. Not only were the most dehumanizing practices proscribed-ritual murder, human sacrifice, slavery-but also many other institutions that were an intricate part of the fabric of communal life. Polygamy was almost universally forbidden. The ancestor cult, a belief that the dead remained a part of the village and should help control its life, was discredited. Ritual dances and chants, ritual drinking, even the traditional and critical rites of passage-ceremonies marking birth, death, puberty, marriage-were treated as lapses into heathenism. Though...
...resisted such innovations as Mass in the vernacular, native songs, instruments and dances, looking on them as part of their rejected past. Experimental native works like the famous Missa Luba were first encouraged by white missionaries. Now, however, the black clergy has taken the lead in Africanizing Catholic ritual. Masses all across the continent are beginning to employ old dance forms and chants. In Zambia, even the tribal lamentations at the bedside of the dying are being reintroduced. Vernacular masses can be found almost everywhere, and native drums, long used to call the faithful to church, are now a common...