Word: rites
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...took him to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Magnitogorsk (pop. 284,000) to be baptized by immersion, as is the practice of the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Rev. Ivan Scherbatov lifted little Vova from the font, the baby was dead-"the victim of a senseless rite," as Moscow's daily Sovietskaya Rossiya put it. Called before a People's Court, Father Scherbatov denied his guilt, contended that the child was ill and would have died anyway. But medical investigators disputed him, and the priest was sentenced to three years in jail. The people...
...They fall in love and go down to the city together to celebrate the carnival in the streets. There her enemy, who is Death, seeks her out and carries her away. Orpheus, heartbroken, goes looking for his lost love at the Bureau of Missing Persons, then at a diabolic rite where spirit-rappers summon up her ghost. In the end, he joins her in death...
...ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...candlelight, the brothers gathered in the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. With swelling pride, they chanted occult jargon and Tom Sawyerish vows. With stern mien, one night last week they launched an ancient rite: the not-so-gentle art of hazing new members before accepting them into the fraternity with its friendships and parties...
...sense to learn algebra and to be useful in the Scouts. Amen.") Hill is also astonished at the "strong note of penitence and personal remorse" that runs through the prayers ("I ask thy forgiveness for all the things I have done wrong"). For many children, he says, the rite of confirmation means forgiveness of sins more than admission into the adult fellowship of the church...