Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...annual ritual took a bizarre turn last week when Notre Dame's Ara Parseghian announced that he was stepping down. Before the shock wave subsided in South Bend, Notre Dame officials triggered another with the word that as Ara's replacement they had chosen Dan Devine, who was about to get his walking papers from the National Football League's Green Bay Packers...
Three Plays from The Towneley Cycle. These may be the best things playing all month for those with a serious, and especially an academic, interest in theater. The Towneley Cycle is one of those compendia of medieval religious plays halfway between ritual and modern drama. This production is the outgrowth of David Staines's English 211 and represents one of the few attempts to bring performing drama within Harvard's academic orbit. The English department should sit up and take note. Two of the three plays that make up the program were translated into modern English by students...
...legacies of medieval Christendom is the anti-Semitic legendry that has stubbornly survived. At its worst, this xenophobic, scapegoat lore was monumental calumny, a "blood libel," as Jews rightly call it, that accused them of ritual murders of Christian children. The accusations were sheer fiction, the trumped-up charges of fanatics or Inquisitors anxious to justify persecution. Now a report from the American Jewish Committee's European office reveals that the old calumnies "still are being commemorated in religious ceremony, festival or art in several Western European countries...
...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 of their religious beliefs, be among the first group of initiates, the Minister of Agriculture argued that the two-month program would interfere with his efforts to increase farm production...
...does not display the same literary tact in regard to other aspects of the Holmes figure. The detective's penchants for frenetic violin playing, for contemplative shag-smoking, and for energetic telegraphing are all thrust into the story because they were effective in the original. The sacred Holmes sleuthing ritual--the animal-like absorption in the tracing of a clue--has been neatly reduced to a series of yelps, whines, and tremors that has been blandly placed into the narrative...