Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...surprisingly, the conservative Buckley has a lingering nostalgia for the Latin liturgy of old. Dripping scorn, he describes a nuptial Mass celebrated "according to the current cant, with everybody popping up and kneeling down." To Buckley, the jazzed-up ritual with its implicit boosterism ("Who do we appreciate--Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!") is "awful." In fairness, though, he could have mentioned some of the Tridentine excrescences that led to the Second Vatican Council's reforms: hymns of stunning vapidity and priests muttering their way through Low Mass with the graceless speed of tobacco auctioneers...
Buddha taught the use of compassion to relieve suffering. Ritual, dogma and temples are irrelevant, red herrings on the path to insight. Karma and reincarnation are merely clever carrot-and-stick tools for people who need them. Most of us can do without them. TOM KOWALSKI Atlanta...
...society in a climate of total vengefulness? When does reason fail to account for our experience? Is the rejection of reason ultimately worth the danger it invites? Why does religious ecstasy give way to violence? And what does this say about our gods' anthropomorphism? Does the beauty of divine ritual withstand the "rage for meaning...
...campaign, the JFK wannabe assigns young Marcy to go back to the "old country"--Ireland--and trace his hereditary roots. Young Marcy arrives in a small, unheard of Irish town (where men have singing competitions and buses are still gender-segregated) at the peak of a quaint annual ritual: The Match-making Festival. Being single, Marcy is a marked woman; a lamb laid out to the wolves...
...American Buddhist history How the Swans Came to the Lake, to climbing the sheerest face of a Himalayan cliff: demanding and perilous. Unwilling to limit themselves to the standard tools--chanting and meditative breath-control techniques--the Vajrayana Buddhists employ an eclectic mix that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies of tantric sex. Buddhism typically took on some of the color of local faiths, but Vajrayana's incorporation of Tibet's gods and demons was especially dramatic, resulting in what Fields describes as "a baroque exuberance [of] priestcraft, rituals, mantras, magic, monasteries, mystics and hermits." Another...