Word: secte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...India go. But the moment of Gandhi's greatest triumph, on August 15, 1947, was also the hour of his defeat. India gained freedom but lost unity when Britain granted independence on the same day it created the new Muslim state of Pakistan. Partition dishonored Gandhi's sect-blind creed. "There is no message at all," he said that day and turned to fasting and prayer...
Ever since the Nation of Islam was founded in the 1930s, its members have lived by the slogan "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say." In his new biography of the sect's enigmatic former leader, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (Pantheon Books; 667 pages; $29), Karl Evanzz aims to pierce that veil of secrecy but misses the mark...
There was initial hope that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would throw light on the roots of Christianity. There was speculation that perhaps John the Baptist and even Jesus himself were members of the sect or closely related to it. The scrolls have already contributed to a fuller understanding of the textual history of Jewish scripture and the realities of 1st century Judaism--especially its variety of apocalyptic hopes and the absence of anything that might be called orthodoxy. However, they have shed no direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers...
China's crackdown on the Falun Gong sect may be inflating the size of the dragon it is trying to slay. Beijing ratcheted up its campaign against the religious group Thursday, branding it a "devil-cult" and vowing to show it no mercy. But despite the heavy prison sentences that Chinese law prescribes for members of cults, hundreds of Falun Gong members continued their almost daily protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China. Although the authorities fear the consequences of allowing a millions-strong religious sect whose leader is based in the U.S. to flourish beyond official control...
...convince the broader public that they represent a threat," says Dowell. "A harsh government crackdown could make the authorities look irrational in the eyes of the public. By choosing to clamp down rather than ignore Falun Gong, the authorities may have elevated its political importance." And if the sect is indeed an expression of the anxiety brought on by traumatic social changes, eliminating it will force that anxiety to simply find other channels of expression...