Word: ritual
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Awash in ritual and responsibility, the immediate aftermath of death becomes a series of obligations and forced situations, meant to cut through, or at least distract from, the numb and searing emptiness of loss. For us, anecdotes—about her and her sayings and doings, even about our various ordeals in getting to the funeral—become a canon of bittersweet memory, the only way to break the terrible hush...
...interviewed a young woman who said she had a ritual before every final exam. There was a tree near Lowell House and she would run circles around it… alone. She thought that brought her good luck. I asked her if she had considered going to Health Services for OCD treatments, but she told me she was comfortable with...
...adjustments to seating plans for the wedding dinner. Nava, a cheerful young woman who had done her national service attending children with cancer and who wanted to study chemistry to help battle the disease, was even more radiant than usual, having returned home after a cleansing ceremony in a ritual bath. As the night wore on and people got hungry, father and daughter saw their opportunity. They dashed out to pick up salads, sandwiches and coffee for everyone, and to finally have their heart-to-heart talk. "David wanted a few moments with his daughter before handing her over...
...that had polluted its essential monotheism. Wahhab's list of corruptions was sweeping; it included Shi'ism, the faith's minority strain, and Sufism, its mystical tradition. He discarded most of the interpretations of Islam's four great legal schools in favor of an exceedingly literal reading of punctilious ritual and enforcement by draconian punishment...
...summer afternoon in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, hundreds of young Muslim students sleep in the shadow of a mosque's arches, enduring the hard stone floor and swarming clouds of flies. Suddenly the call to prayer resounds through a loudspeaker. The boys spring up to wash in ritual preparation. Starting as young as 8, these boys spend six hours a day memorizing the Koran, with breaks only for rest and prayer. The students get no lessons in math, geography, history or computers. Allah's will as recorded in the holy Koran, the teachers say, is all they need...