Okay, I have a rural pre-19th cen. grave yard that's about to be flooded. It's bodies are being re-located by archaeologists under permit from the Army Corp of Engineers. After excavating several pre-modern bodies, they are going to find a modern murder. At this point I assume they'll call the Sheriff's office, but because the archaeologist are permitted and there are still pre-modern bodies that have to moved, what would the procedure be? How would the remaining pre-modern bodies be handled, ect. Also, it's very likely that in my need for more words they might find the a pre-modern body was Native and fell under NAGPRA.
Also, I need to know about exorcisms in protestant house church/neo-pente movements, especially ones that go wrong. One of my characters is a fifteen year old boy, who's suspected of being gay, and his mother has him exorcised. He's going to end up dead later in the book, and this will make the cops rather suspicious, so I need to know what the mom and pastor would tell the cops about the exorcism vs. what might have actually happened. (And anything that would show up in physical evidence would be helpful).
And lastly, my totally made up house church/neo-pente group is going to get a lot of bad press, but there are also several other suspects in the boy's death. (His very fundamentalist mother, his Native father, his best friend with a drug habit, the Islamic parents of the girl he knocked up, the Catholic priest of the church he and his friends recently vandalized, and his other girlfriend).
The community is a large town/small city, but is pretty isolated from the rest of the world, though very religiously mixed as it was the only place religious group could have missions before recently (30% Catholic, 15% Main Stream Prot., 15% Islamic, 15% Norse Pagans, 5% Fundamentalist Prot., 5% Atheist, 5% Buddhist, 5% Native American religious beliefs, 5% Other (aka, I'm writing a steam punk-fantasy-historical AU murder mystery set in the present day) and I need some religiously related rioting. ). So, tell me which group incites the rioting. Also, what are some things that the cops might do in this situation that would offend/create controversy in this situation.
Anything will help, thanks.
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54,753 / 50,000
Oct 10, 2007 - 15 58
Any group can start the rioting if given sufficient motivation. I'm not sure what a protestant house church is, but I can tell you that in confirmation class at my protestant church, when I asked the pastor how to perform an exorcism, he said you just needed to say something to the effect of, "In Christ's name, I command you to leave."
----------Sit down at a typewriter and open a vein, huh? NaNoWriMo: my annual hemorrhage.
50,689 / 50,000
Oct 10, 2007 - 17 02
I once found a bunch of links about exorcism but am disorganized enough to have lost them. A few things I think I remember (unreliable):
Differences between Protestant exorcisms and Catholic:
Both can involve long periods of prayer.
Some protestant groups believe a "true Christian" can't be possessed (because s/he is already indwelt by the Holy Spirit) and so would follow up with more prayer for the victim's conversion.
I don't know whether the various nutbar exorcisms involving tormenting the victim to "drive out the demon" come from one or the other or both. It that's the sort you want you might be better off checking court records.
0 / 50,000
Oct 13, 2007 - 14 05
Yeah, I'm looking for more of the "nutbar"/dominionist/really conservative, literalist, speaking in tongues, demons cause everything that goes wrong type church. House churches are churches that don't have a building, they usually rotate between member's houses (giving the cops an excuse to search several member's houses). At this point I'm sort of making up my own exorcism ritual, since this is an au earth.
I think it's going to be my Norse Pagans who start the riot, which has turned into a small, angry mob at the cop's HQ. The boy's grandparents are Vinlandi (the Viking colony in Labrador thrived, and they intermarried with the Indians and basically kept the colony a secret until Christopher Columbus discovered America) and disapprove of their daughter's conversion to protestantism.