Word: sects
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...waste any thoughts on the future," she says. "I don't plan for it." Sister Sadie is 98, the oldest living member of the sect; there are only about 50 left. For within the Shaker fold, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no marriage or giving in marriage; Shakers are made, not born, and there were never more than 6,000 of them. But for 200 years they carried on a remarkable experiment in welding mystical religion with practicality...
Although his parents were pious Vaishnavas (a Hindu sect which strictly abstains from meat eating), Gandhi was goaded a few years later into sampling goat meat to emulate the British. "Afterwards," he reported, "I passed a very bad night. . . . Every time I dropped off to sleep, it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me; and I would jump up full of remorse...
Biggest numerical gain between 1926 and 1941-42 was scored by the largest single sect,* the Roman Catholics, with 4.3 million. But by percentages, Roman Catholicism is doing no better than the general trend: during the same period, "the 43 larger Protestant denominations showed a combined rate of growth of nearly 24%-almost identical with the percentage gain of the Roman Catholic Church...
...made the sacred objects -and called them santos-never owed allegiance to the U.S. They were the hard handful of caballeros, Navaho slaves, and converted Pueblo Indians (including the fanatical sect of Indian flagellants known as Penitentes) who lived along the headwaters of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. For them, civilization and the cathedral which symbolized it lay in Mexico City, over 1,000 miles to the southeast. When their imported plaster statues crumbled and the oil paintings in their adobe chapels faded away, they created their own rowel-sharp art. It was one of history's best...
...Protestantism passively tolerates any compromise of the principle of the quality of all religious faiths before the American state, it seals its own destiny. It dooms itself to become, in the end, a minority sect existing on the margins of American life...