Word: rituals
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Police late last week arrested Paul Stedman Cullen, 45, and said he apparently poisoned the tree as part of a ritual. Hanging, though, is not in prospect. Cullen could get only up to 20 years for criminal mischief, a felony...
...loner by temperament and circumstance -- his family was constantly relocating from one drab Piedmont town to another -- Price describes the boy he was as "a born witness or spy . . . helplessly fascinated by the ritual power of language." In Clear Pictures he comes across as a precocious Dixie dandy, worrying earnestly about God and masturbation, and toadying up to visiting artistes like the great contralto Marian Anderson by sending them portraits he had sketched from publicity stills...
Friends say that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul often talks in bis, a reference to the musical notation for "repeat phrase." But what could be mistaken for an affectation is actually a ritual of concentration that is performed on something as simple as the way a lintel rests on an ancient pillar or as complex as how the past weighs on the present...
Absent father. Melancholy mom. Squall-free adolescence followed by the ritual college degree. But with no draft to face -- no obligations at all, really -- how is a bright, sensitive, well-off young fellow to grow up? Honoring tradition, Alec Stern decides to go abroad to try out maturity. His destination: Tokyo. Bicycle Days, a first novel by a 24-year-old Harvard graduate, is the wry, rueful story of Alec's efforts to cope with his job at a computer outfit and with a vexing foreign culture. Through his adoptive family, the friendship of an old fisherman and a troubling...
Feminist clout also shows up in the book's liturgical section. In the new wedding ritual, for example, the father no longer gives away the bride. Another change in worship concerns the Lord's Supper. The abstemious Methodists specified in their 1966 hymnal that only "the pure unfermented juice of the grape shall be used." Teetotalers attending last year's Methodist conference failed to get that clause inscribed into church law, and the new hymnal omits the rule. So congregations may use wine if they wish, but most Methodists still opt for grape juice. Score one for tradition...