(n.) A solemn form of supplication in the public worship of various churches, in which the clergy and congregation join, the former leading and the latter responding in alternate sentences. It is usually of a penitential character.
Example Sentences:
(1) Before issuing the ruling, the judge Shaban El-Shamy read a lengthy series of remarks detailing what he described as a litany of ills committed by the Muslim Brotherhood, including “spreading chaos and seeking to bring down the Egyptian state”.
(2) A well-meaning litany of no-nos: don't be racist, don't be sexist, don't be homophobic, don't shill the World Cup to countries with human-rights issues .
(3) Resorting to outside help to solve a problem that even the most patriotic of politicians now readily concedes is homegrown – the result of a litany of mistakes committed over the past 30 years – was never an option.
(4) The details in the report – including 13 incidents in which a total of 179 people died – rehearse a litany of horror.
(5) These challenges include: declining demand for power in the UK, currently falling at 1% a year as energy-saving measures take effect; a three-fold jump in the UK’s interconnection capacity with continental Europe by 2022, massively increasing the country’s ability to import cheaper supplies; and “a litany of setbacks” in Finland, France and China for EdF’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) model, the same type as planned for Hinkley Point.
(6) It's not just the kidneys – I could give you a litany of things that are wrong with me.
(7) The report, seen by the Guardian, is “deeply confused and deeply misleading” and a “litany of errors and false assumptions, clearly written ultimately as a disinformation tool”, according to two financial experts.
(8) An emotional Obama ran through a litany of Isis human-rights abuses, from rape to enslavement, calling them “cowardly acts of violence.” In a vague reference to Americans held captive by Isis or near its path in Iraq, Obama said the US would “do everything we can to protect our people,” a formulation that has preceded US military action in the past.
(9) Lahn said they found “a litany of pilots that have failed”, either due to lack of funding or broken equipment that wasn’t maintained.
(10) On appeal, he found his paperwork contained a litany of errors: it stated he had been a cat C prisoner (he was cat D); was in prison for murder (it was GBH); and had been moved from open conditions after six days for behaviour issues (he had been in an open prison for two years without incident and returned to closed conditions to be assessed for a course).
(11) National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label.
(12) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
(13) Blair Jenkins, chief executive of Yes Scotland, said Cameron's speech "was the same litany of empty threats and empty promises we have come to expect from the no campaign – and he is the prime minister who has been orchestrating the campaign of ridiculous scaremongering being directed against Scotland".
(14) There was nothing like the usual litany of careful gratitude towards the local political machinery.
(15) A vast and completely incomprehensible litany of activities is forbidden there.
(16) This is a litany of economic and public health disasters from just one bill.
(17) One activist, Alexei Navalny, has launched a new website detailing the litany of corruption allegations surrounding the Games, claiming that the 10 Olympic venues cost more than twice as much as necessary.
(18) On Monday Hywood told Fairfax staff not to believe the “litany of bizarre commentary on the state of the industry” and the “speculative lies” about Fairfax Media, including that it would stop printing the Monday to Friday metropolitan newspapers by the end of the year.
(19) The HSE's latest report on Sellafield, posted online, discloses a litany of problems at the crowded site which sprawls over six square miles on the edge of the Lake District and is home to more than a thousand nuclear facilities, some dating back more than 50 years.
(20) In response to this litany of misery, politicians of all parties point to the only metric that matters to them and cry: but crime is falling.
Liturgy
Definition:
(a.) An established formula for public worship, or the entire ritual for public worship in a church which uses prescribed forms; a formulary for public prayer or devotion. In the Roman Catholic Church it includes all forms and services in any language, in any part of the world, for the celebration of Mass.
Example Sentences:
(1) Already the demand for such a liturgy is growing among clergy, who are embarrassed by having to withhold the church's official support from so many of their own flock who are in civil partnerships.
(2) Indeed, the best that many wedding service liturgies can do to insist that Jesus himself supported the institution of marriage is to say that he once turned up at one.
(3) Nobody believes any of this stuff, of course, but it has to be said, rather like a familiar religious liturgy.
(4) Only one has been issued so far this century – by Pope Benedict to give Anglicans a way of joining the Catholic church without having to forgo their liturgy and so on.
(5) They deplore the loss of ancient liturgy and Latin; they are sticklers for the rules, especially on sexual morality, and prize top-down authority over individual conscience.
(6) No other court in the past 50 years has allowed public school officials to lead children in formal religious rituals like the Hindu liturgy of praying to, bowing to, and worshipping the sun god,” attorney Dean Broyles said in a statement.
(7) While stressing that it is not advocating any change to the church's teaching on sexual conduct, it suggests that the house of bishops may wish to consider whether it should issue guidance on liturgy.
(8) Otherwise, there was silence, punctuated only by the comforting murmur of several hundred voices reciting a liturgy they knew by heart.
(9) "Appropriating other people's liturgies," whispered one wry cleric, "does bring certain difficulties."
(10) Yes, just in case you were looking for some spiritually-uplifting sounds to accompany the white smoke, look no further: Spotify have worked with the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy (NDCL) in the United States to come up with 29 pieces of music that they say will "give the listener a disposition of wonder, of contemplation, of prayer".
(11) A priest hurrying through the liturgy, the commentator at Walthamstow dog track?
(12) And I thought: ‘If you’ve not got a PR operation, you’re obviously not planning to open any time soon.’ But their line was always, ‘It’s about to happen.’ There’s a line in the Anglican liturgy: ‘The hope of glory to come.’ It was like that.” As time went on, she says, the mood of the All Saints neighbourhood came to be defined by the empty expanse of land at its heart.
(13) The group does not propose any specially authorised liturgy for the blessing of same-sex relationships and says the move would not require any change to church teachings.
(14) "The thing that makes evangelical churches popular is the informality, the lack of structure of the service, the fact that they don't use traditional liturgy, and they've got good music that young people love and they engage with.
(15) Speaking at a press conference following the report's publication, Sir Joseph said one consequence of the lack of authorised liturgy was the "room for manoeuvre" when it came to the kind of ceremony priests might be able to offer same-sex couples.
(16) We think of religion as the bible, morality, sacred tradition, doctrine, ritual, liturgy.
(17) The proposals in the church's theological commission report on ordaining gay ministers for a gay marriage liturgy was one of his "worst nightmares", Randall said.
(18) This, and the primacy of the word of God in monastic liturgy, made Hume naturally ecumenically-minded.
(19) At that time, the morning services replicated the experience of the grander sort of public-school chapel, with a robed choir, a liturgy from 1662 and a well-bred congregation lined up on pews.
(20) "It is a consecrated space where important liturgies are celebrated and where popes are elected.