Word: rituals
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...next three weekends, College Democrats and the Clinton-Gore '96 campaign will be running buses to New Hampshire for college students in the Boston area, free of charge. The New Hampshire primary is a ritual in American life which happens only once every four years...
What's new is the theater of it. Television does not create weather, any more than it creates contemporary politics. However, the ritual ceremonies of televised weather have endowed a subject often previously banal with an amazing life as mass entertainment, nationwide interactive preoccupation and a kind of immense performance...
When the ghastly scene was discovered, the day before Christmas Eve, much of appalled Western Europe was compelled to ask--again--Why? The winter solstice ritual enacted about an hour's drive from the site of the glittering 1992 Winter Olympics reprised similar cult sacrifices that took place 14 months earlier. And among the victims were some of the most privileged, responsible members of society. Besides the police officers, the woman psychotherapist and an architect, the dead included Patrick Vuarnet, the 27-year-old son of 1960 Winter Olympics gold medalist Jean Vuarnet, best known today for his line...
This solution is appropriate for highly public spaces such as a town green or a public school. These are the property of a people whose Constitution guarantees against any establishment of religion. The president's yearly ritual of lighting the national Christmas tree is surely problematic. Decorating a non-religious public school for specific holidays excludes an entire group of students. In these cases, it seems appropriate that individuals should find other outlets for their religious expression...
Watching the 112th Harvard-Yale Game certainly tends to make one reflect. The Game was first played in 1875, and the ritual has been repeated with reverence and care for more than a century. To understand that this is one of Harvard's more recent innovations is truly to realize the unparalleled place this University has in our national story. Unfortunately, even the extraordinary becomes mundane when experienced too often, and we begin to forget to take notice of that which has the potential to inspire. So many of us, myself included, have little sense of the majestic chain...