Word: sects
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Sheela, a raven-haired 35-year-old who joined the sect in 1973, was the leader of the first band of Rajneeshees that settled in 1981 in what was then Antelope, Ore., a hamlet of 40. As their numbers increased, the sannyasins (followers) bought out older residents, registered to vote and took over the city council, changing the name Antelope to Rajneesh in 1984. Sheela was responsible for the scheme to recruit about 3,500 homeless people for the commune last fall, in what observers believe was an attempt to load the voting rolls against longer-term residents of Wasco...
...obsolete sense of whim or quirk, but that won't help matters much. And what will readers make of such Fowlesian whims as building his plot around questions to which he never provides the answers? Or resting his conclusion on an assumed familiarity with the Shakers, that little-known sect of puritanical Protestants who arose in England two centuries ago and later prospered briefly...
...official Church News of Salt Lake City published the letter last month. It was written by Martin Harris, a farmer who lived near Palmyra, N.Y. Harris was Smith's first convert outside the prophet's family. Addressed to a Canandaigua, N.Y., newspaper editor who later joined the sect, the document describes a version of the foundations of Mormonism that differs markedly from the official account written by Smith in 1838. The letter, discovered in 1983 | and donated to the church last month by a Utah businessman, depicts Smith as a man influenced by folk magic and occultism. This appears...
...campaign is designed to explain Unification doctrine, polish the sect's tarnished image and achieve mainstream respectability. In the past year, for example, 7,000 clergy have been courted at all-expenses-paid Unification seminars in the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, as well as at U.S. sites. Moon- related scientific conferences have tried to win prestige by signing up Nobel scholars, while a Unification-backed anti-Communist agency seeks allies among fundamentalists. Capitalizing on its ownership of the daily Washington Times and New York Tribune, the Moon movement has run junkets for hundreds of journalists to soften media hostility...
...were followers of the Zion Christian Church, which claims more than 4 million members. Botha's reception gave some credence to the President's claim that his white minority government has the support of a number of South Africa's 23 million blacks. The church is a rigidly conservative sect that forbids its members to smoke, drink or disobey the law. As its Bishop, Barnabas Lekganyane, 31, put it last week, "It is not for the individual to judge the law, it is for the individual to obey...