Word: romane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gill's comment on male-contraceptive ads told of the interesting Roman and Israelite custom of swearing by the male genitalia [LETTERS, May 31]. It should be noted, however, that the most common usage of the word testis in Latin texts is as a term for a witness, as in a court case. Thus an etymologist would note that the English word testicle is derived directly from the Roman custom of swearing by the genitals, and that every man carries his own "little witnesses." (And my parents have been wondering what I would do with my degree in classics.) CANDACE...
...Membership in the Roman Catholic Church is at 1 billion and on the rise, but its market share of the world?s population is shrinking. In Africa and Asia, the church?s "workforce" ?- the number of priests and nuns -? is increasing, a sure sign of John Paul?s road-warrior evangelizing and media savvy. But in North America and Europe, the number of the truly committed is decreasing, which may be a sign that his staunch refusal to compromise is turning First World Catholics into something of a spectator church, professing faith but ignoring doctrine. Such developments lead to dilution...
...this era of "ethnic cleansing," identity politics and dislocation of communities, it is heartening that one of the most marginalized people in recent history--a minority Albanian inside Slavic Macedonia, a minority Roman Catholic among Muslims and Orthodox Christians--should find a home, citizenship and acceptance in an Indian city of countless non-Christians. She blurred the line between insider and outsider that so many today are trying to deepen...
Bojaxhiu was born of Roman Catholic Albanian parents in 1910 in Shkup (now Skopje), a town that straddled the ethnic, linguistic, religious and geological fault line in the then Turkish province, later Yugoslav republic, now absurdly unnameable independent state of FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). When she was seven, her father was murdered. Bojaxhiu chose emigration over political activism and at the age of 18 entered the Sisters of Loreto's convent in Ireland as a novice. The Sisters of Loreto, a teaching order, sent her to Bengal in 1929. She spoke broken English...
...Catherine Muskett is too young to remember the day the Roman Catholic music died. The Latin prayers, the ethereal Gregorian chant--they were cast out of the Catholic Mass in the 1960s, after the modernizing church council known as Vatican II. But Muskett doesn't remember the '60s either. To her, today's perky folk-guitar Masses are more grating than groovy. "Catholics of my generation are starved for the real thing," she says. So each Sunday, she and her family drive half an hour to attend the Solemn High Mass, most of it in Latin, offered by St. Catherine...