Word: sacramental
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
AMERICAN political conventions are perhaps democracy's most spectacular sacrament. H.L. Mencken found them "as fascinating as a revival or hanging," and they are often a little of both. As sheer theater, they are a special American form, a television marathon, a grandiose town meeting staged by DeMille. Yet for all their exuberant buncombe, their stretches of interminable tedium and their gusts of rhetoric, the conventions have the seriousness and the fascination of great political power in transfer...
...actual substance of Christ's body and blood, even though they keep the same appearance. The Thirty-Nine Articles, established by the Church of England after its 16th century split with Rome, said that transubstantiation was "repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions." Thus the difference in the way they look on the rite of Communion is one of the major barriers in reuniting the two churches...
...Vicar Monick, baptism is a sacrament of rebirth that profits not only the newly baptized, but those "on the far side of Christ" who have seen their hopes crushed-as in the upheavals and violence of the '60s-and need their faith reaffirmed. To express all this symbolically through environmental theater, Monick worked for two months with the event's directors, Kevin O'Connor, a Roman Catholic, and Gordon Stewart, a Presbyterian. One nice touch they devised to dramatize the rebirth theme: during the baptism, members of the cast circulated among the worshipers washing the mud from...
Confirmation, in the Roman Catholic Church, is the sacrament that marks the young Catholic's entry into the adult church, a kind of personal Pentecost in which he gathers strength from the Holy Spirit to become a mature Christian. Usually administered to youngsters between the age of seven and their early teens, the sacrament is meant to reaffirm their baptismal commitment, and is generally conferred personally by a bishop...
Lutheran participants urged their own churches to acknowledge Roman Catholic validity. Member churches, they suggested, should "declare formally" that Catholic clergy "are engaged in a valid ministry of the Gospel" and that "the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are truly present in their celebrations of the sacrament of the altar...