Word: worshiper
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...their style of worship appears out of sync with that preferred by Turkey's conservative Sunni ruling party, consider the Alevis' politics: They are Muslims, but their doctrine is unflinchingly progressive, favoring abortion, gay rights, equal opportunity for women, and pacifism. They praise everyone from Buddhists to Baptists, and admit to liberal borrowing from many faiths. They don't believe in heaven or hell, don't perform the Hajj pilgrimage, and don't face Mecca when they pray. God, they like to say, resides in people, not in mountains or stones...
...them as a religion. The Alevi are also up against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last year, AKP lawmaker Mustafa Ozbayrak, referring to Alevi demands that they be allocated state funds, said, "If you give this to the Alevis, will you give the Satanists the same tomorrow...
...centuries, the Alevi response to persecution has been to worship in secret, while trying to pass as Sunni. Amid the political liberalization that has accompanied Turkey's efforts to join the European Union, however, many Alevi have begun emerging from the shadows. At the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the cemevi runs entirely on donations to the tune of $159,000 a year. Volunteers teach traditional Alevi music and dance, while the group's pro bono lawyers fight for Alevi rights in court. Last year, an Alevi parent, angered by compulsory religion classes his teenage...
...kind of devotion that Padre Pio's followers display is not excluded in the Ratzinger recipe for spreading the gospel. Indeed such open-hearted faith, and saint worship itself, is intrinsic to the Pope's message. He wrote of saints in his last encyclical, Spe Salvi or "Saved by Hope." In his recently completed visit to the United States, the saints were the focus of his talk to young people and seminarians in Yonkers, New York. "Fix your gaze on our saints. The diversity of their experience of God's presence prompts us to discover anew the breadth and depth...
...Sanja Matsuri takes place on the third weekend of May. On the Friday prior, floats process to Asakusa Shrine, a Shinto place of worship close by Sensoji, for the binzasara no mai, or "harvest dance." The mikoshi parade comes the following day. Locals say that the more a shrine sways and shakes, the greater the gods' favor. The festival ends on Sunday, usually with a parade of the three mikoshi belonging to the local shrine. But because revelers became so rowdy last year - climbing on to the structures during the procession - for safety reasons the three mikoshi...