How to Use laity in a Sentence

laity

noun

• The laity has played an important role in the history of the church.
• No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; ’Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love.
  — John Edgar Wideman, The New Yorker, 8 July 2021
• In a remarkable shift, it is being led by a 2-to-3 margin by laity.
  — Nicole Winfield, The Seattle Times, 31 July 2018
• In the initial phases, there will be training and dialogue for priests and laity.
  — Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press, 6 June 2020
• The laity were to be monogamous, the holy men celibate, and the actually divine would not even feel lust.
  — S. C. Cornell, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2025
• In some temples, a monk’s duty is to sit inside one of the main halls and wait until the laity comes to receive offerings and give blessings.
  — Brooke Schedneck, The Conversation, 27 Mar. 2025
• In the message, the pope expressed concern for the laity and clergy of Germany if their leaders break with established church teaching.
  — Fox News, 21 July 2022
• The adoption of meditation by the Buddhist laity in Southeast Asia began during the 1880s.
  — David Kortava, Harper's Magazine, 16 Mar. 2021
• That has emboldened bishops and laity to test the limits of Rome’s authority.
  — Francis X. Rocca, WSJ, 29 Sep. 2021
• From this perspective, halachah is a partnership between the laity and the rabbinate, with the laity playing a critical role in the halachic process.
  — Rabbi Avi Weiss, Sun Sentinel, 9 May 2022
• For the next seventy years, the esoteric practice slowly spread among the Buddhist laity.
  — David Kortava, Harper's Magazine, 16 Mar. 2021
• Among the laity there are now serious efforts to draft and institute reforms that would ensure bishops tell the truth and are held accountable.
  — William McGurn, WSJ, 30 July 2018
• No member of the laity or clergy may conduct a worship service or a devotion of any kind in a church, or other location.
  — al, 17 Mar. 2020
• It's run mostly by laity, but in cooperation with church prelates and the wider Catholic hierarchy.
  — Fox News, 28 Aug. 2022
• Laity would play a key role in that effort as top overseer of energy and environmental rules.
  — Hannah Hess, Science | AAAS, 15 June 2017
• To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy.
  — Marilynne Robinson, New Republic, 12 Dec. 2017
• But his numbers lag behind Trump's ratings among the Republican laity, 85% of whom have a positive view of the President.
  — Jennifer Agiesta, CNN, 20 Dec. 2017
• Her defection from a youthful spell as a novice nun is both a credential of her expertise and a qualification for talking to the laity.
  — Dominic Green, WSJ, 16 Sep. 2022
• The position is currently held by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the head of the Vatican’s laity office.
  — Nicole Winfield, ajc, 7 June 2023
• The position is currently held by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the head of the Vatican's laity office.
  — Nicole Winfield, Star Tribune, 6 July 2021
• Another task, in the midst of a clergy shortage, is to lift up the laity to take greater responsibility for their own communities.
  — Hartford Courant, 13 Oct. 2022
• Both laity and high-ranking clerics helped cover it up, some even participating by holding the victim down.
  — Audrey Clare Farley, The New Republic, 13 Dec. 2022
• This recent cultural shift in Western nations has raised difficult questions for Catholics, both clergy and laity.
  — Joanne M. Pierce, The Conversation, 4 Nov. 2022
• At one end, clergy and laity alike edged forward carrying the great block of stone with reverent heaving so intense, and with such reverent slow motion, that it was believed that angels moved it.
  — Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020
• Reforms on the table include how to give greater roles to women in the Catholic Church, including ordaining them as deacons, and the greater inclusion of laity in governance and decision making.
  — Christopher Lamb, CNN, 15 Mar. 2025
• Collected here are examples of ecclesiastic garb as it has been translated for the laity.
  — Vogue, 3 May 2018
• Delegates are to be seated at round tables, with around a dozen laity and clergy mixed together in the Vatican’s big auditorium.
  — Nicole Winfield, BostonGlobe.com, 20 June 2023
• One such example is the story of the Dominican friar Felix Fabri, who was known for recording his own pilgrimages in various formats, some geared toward the laity and some for his brothers.
  — Kathryn Barush, The Conversation, 10 Aug. 2020
• This suffering is elicited by the intercession of qualified (or ordained) critics and psychotherapists, who join in this communion of pain and distress, and share it with the laity via books and monographs.
  — Will Self, Harper's Magazine, 23 Nov. 2021
• Luther, perhaps more aware of the accessibility of the thoughts and writings of Wycliffe and Hus, or of the growing pressures of print and vernacular literacy, dismisses the idea that the laity were to be excluded from these disputes.
  — Marilynne Robinson, New Republic, 12 Dec. 2017