What is "cruciform"

Usage examples of "cruciform".

With its population of one and a half billion souls, all born-again Christians carrying the cruciform, most employed by the Vatican or the huge civilian, military, or mercantile bureaucracy of the Pax state, the planet Pacem paused to listen with some interest.

Lourdusamy -- then a young, minor functionary in the Vatican diplomatic machine -- with guiding the anguished and pain-ridden ex-Hyperion pilgrim, Father Lenar Hoyt, to finding the secret that tamed the cruciform to an instrument of resurrection.

Or had, before the Pax introduced the cruciform and physical resurrection to humanity.

Kenzo Isozaki lifted one hand as if he were going to touch her, pointed, and then returned the hand to his own chest and touched the double-barred cruciform that ran from his sternum to just above his navel.

People traveled between worlds in the Pax -- millionaires mostly, businesspeople and adventurers willing to spend months in cryogenic sleep and years of time-debt traveling by Mercantilus transport between the stars, smug in their cruciform certainty that job and home and family would be waiting in their steady-state Christian universe when they returned -- but it was rare, and no one traveled between worlds without money and Pax permission.

And on the Iceshelf I had been hurt three times -- twice cut from shrapnel after white mines had killed buddies, once lanced from a long-range sniper -- that final wound serious enough to bring in a priest who all but demanded that I accept the cruciform before it was too late.

Even the slightest bit of cruciform is all that is necessary for the Sacrament of Resurrection.

I stared at him, thinking that the boy would not get his cruciform and would die of cancer.

Writhing on the floor, his body and brain useless appendages to a cruciform of horrific pain radiating through his body, Isozaki tried to scream through his locked jaws.

In the back of the chair was embossed what at first appeared to be a cruciform, but what, upon second glance, was revealed to be the triple cross of the Pope.

The cruciform -- a sort of organic computer in which is stored the neurological and physiological data of a living human being -- restored the body but not the full intellect or personality.

The cruciform, in order to restore the mind and body of a human being, must not only keep track of these atoms and neurons, but remember the precise configuration of the standing holistic wave front which comprises the human memory and personality.

Also, those who have never carried a cruciform can be vectors for this virus.

I knew of no way that a Christian with the cross could rid herself of a cruciform, short of the secret ritual of excommunication, which only the Church could perform.

In a Pax universe where the vast majority of individuals chose the cruciform -- chose to attempt to be immortal -- birth control was a given.