Word: sects
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Nearly all Iranian Moslems belong to the Shiite minority. Shiites have been at odds for 1300 years with the Sunni sect, which the Saudi royal family follows and which makes up 85 percent of the world's 850 million Moslems...
Saudi Arabia's rulers follow Abdul-Wahhab, who founded an austere Sunni sect more than 200 years...
Like certain Amish and Mennonite groups, Jehovah's Witnesses practice shunning: believers are required to treat as pariahs those who have been ousted from the sect. Since 1981 those who leave voluntarily have also been ostracized, even by close relatives. Janice Paul of Anchorage, a former Witness who was shunned by her close friends in the sect after she defected, decided to strike back. She sued the Governing Body of the Jehovah's Witnesses for unspecified damages, citing her emotional distress. An appeals court in San Francisco, upholding a previous ruling by a federal district court, has turned away Paul...
...that the couples and the uncoupled inhabit in these stories. Most are set in the New England exurbs whose historical and residential enchantments are mainstays of Updike's magic kit. An exception is The Ideal Village, about a party of gringo fact finders in the jungle settlement of a sect of Central American social visionaries. The story is to the others in the book what The Coup is to Updike's other novels, a public variation on the folly of private utopias. Concludes the narrator: "It was not until weeks afterwards, collating our diaries in the course of preparing...
...Your sect by it's sufferings," wrote the author of the Declaration of Independence, "has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practised by all when in power." After spirited bidding at Sotheby's in New York City, the browned, spotted piece of paper went to Ludwig Jesselson, 75, a collector of Judaica. The price: $396,000, the highest figure ever paid for a presidential document...