The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2478 page)

 
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Thanksgiving Day
.

A national holiday in the USA on the fourth Thursday of Nov., to give thanks for the blessings of the past year. It is traditionally derived from the settlers in Plymouth, Mass. who observed a day of thanksgiving for their first harvest in the autumn of 1621.

 
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Thanksgiving Psalms
.

Designation of one of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
. It contains a number of poems, all of which begin, ‘I thank thee, O Lord’, or ‘Blessed be thou, O Lord’.

 
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(Gk., ‘wonder-working’). The power to work miracles, hence ‘thaumaturgical’, religions endorsing the working of miracles, especially healing. The term ‘thaumaturgus’ is applied in Christianity to saints who have worked many miracles, e.g. St Gregory Thaumaturgus (213–68), who was made bishop of Neocaesarea and converted virtually the whole city—the first of many miracles.

 
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Theatre and drama
.

Theatre, both East and West, has been, and often still is, closely connected to religious
ritual
: the development of theatre and dramatic form is equally connected to liturgy. Conversely, liturgy and ritual share much in common with theatre and drama. In religious theatre, as in ritual and liturgy, meaning is expressed through the body, especially through the hands, often in coded and non-verbal languages, at least as much as it is through text—indeed, frequently there is no spoken text at all—hence the links with ballet: see
DANCE
. These connections remain particularly obvious in E. religions. In India, there is a continuing tradition of dance, which is not simply derived from ritual but is still an expression of it. The spread of Hinduism into SE Asia led to an integration with indigenous rituals, leading to many characteristic forms of ritual drama—e.g. in Bali and in Java in the ‘shadow theatre’ (a type of puppet theatre,
wayang kulit
or
wayang purwa
).
In Christianity, theatre remained closely connected to ritual through liturgical drama which issued eventually in the miracle plays (dramatizations setting forth the life, miracles, and/or martyrdom of a saint), the mysteries (cycles of plays in which the story of humanity was set forth from the fall of
Lucifer
to the Last Judgement), and the moralities (dramatized allegories; early examples are
The Castle of Perseverance
and
The Summoning of Everyman
, more usually known simply as
Everyman
). In Spain, the
auto sacramental
was an even more direct development from the medieval morality plays, and led to the powerful transformations of the form effected by Calderón (1600–81). He wrote more than seventy
autos
, which expounded the meaning of faith, but which were devotional as well. In the 20th cent., there have been notable attempts in the theatre to explore Christian faith by dramatists who have strongly held Christian beliefs themselves, notably T. S.
Eliot
and Charles Williams, and less successfully (because more obviously) Graham Greene.
See also
RITUAL
and
DANCE
; for Japan see NO DRAMA; for Sh
’a passion plays see
TA‘ZIYA
.

 
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