Word: rituals
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...94th Congress convened, its arcane opening ritual smacked quaintly of quill pens and snuff. Indeed, the Senate's two snuff boxes were freshly filled as the ten new and 23 re-elected Senators filed down the aisle in groups of four to take their oaths of office and bask in the standing applause of their colleagues. In the House, Democrat Carl Albert and Republican John Rhodes withdrew from the chamber as that body staged its selection of the Speaker. When the foregone vote was over, Rhodes graciously introduced Winner Albert as "my good friend, the leader for all members...
...patient. But the most powerful part of the drama is Shaffer's use of the psychiatric technique of abreaction--the literal replaying of key events--on stage. This allows him to get anything he wants on stage without any question of its being out of place. The choreographed ritual of the blinding, over in an instant, is much less like melodrama when it comes at the end of the play, the logical last step of the psychiatric treatment, rather than, for example, the opening scene. Complaints by practicing psychiatrists that Shaffer fails their test of "psychiatric realism" and oversimplifies their...
...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...