How to Use syncretic in a Sentence

syncretic

adjective
  • Día de los Muertos is one of the great syncretic festivals of Latin America.
    Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2020
  • But the new syncretic fusion of Judaism and Christianity makes no sense.
    Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 13 June 2018
  • Their homes — made of mud brick and stucco, with walls now jagged or altogether missing — stand as monuments to the Draa’s rich, syncretic past and to the enthralling boundlessness of its present.
    Michael Snyder, New York Times, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Here was the syncretic style of old Hong Kong refined for an international audience.
    Liam Fitzpatrick / Hong Kong, Time, 30 Aug. 2017
  • The film ends in a joyful, syncretic reunion—the Nehruvian nation transposed onto the family in the clearest possible fashion.
    Samanth Subramanian, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2022
  • The book is an effortful reference for how New York morphed from a syncretic collection of diasporas into a bland sovereignty of the mega-rich.
    Amy Rose Spiegel, New Republic, 27 July 2017
  • The exhibition ends with a remarkable example of the syncretic character of the classical world: a bust of a Greek version of an Egyptian god (Serapis), made for the far reaches of the Roman empire.
    Edward Rothstein, WSJ, 31 Mar. 2018
  • Although Pastor John’s stories and songs seem strange or syncretic, the community of Soulsville responds with enthusiasm.
    David Wallace, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2019
  • Once over his bewilderment, though, Dylan soon surpasses most historians in quickly building a syncretic sense of the whole.
    Sean Wilentz, The New York Review of Books, 19 June 2021
  • Solo Cissokho—another customer of the monastery’s workshop—began a series of collaborations with folk musicians in Norway and Lithuania, echoing the syncretic spirit of the monks.
    Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2022
  • Action Sharing is an ideas competition for artistic projects that make syncretic use of mechatronic elements.
    Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 28 Oct. 2010
  • Nance’s photography reveals a common thread between these faiths—which emerged from the dizzying clash of African, European, and American cultures—and the festival’s equally syncretic enactment of pan-African unity.
    Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2022
  • At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture.
    Gabino Iglesias, Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Taiwanese often credit this to their country's syncretic mix of cultural influences, from indigenous groups, to Dutch and Japanese colonizers, to folk practices carried across the Taiwan Strait.
    The Washington Post, AL.com, 24 May 2017
  • The galleries devoted to religious work beg for a survey of syncretic spiritual imagery and the fluid lines between Christian and African religious representation.
    Washington Post, 14 Apr. 2022
  • The plot is similarly syncretic, a mélange of updated folklore, contemporary eco-spiritualism and tried-and-true Disney-Pixar formula.
    A. O. Scott, New York Times, 22 Nov. 2016
  • Voodoo refers to syncretic religious practices developed by Caribbean slaves who took spiritual traditions from their native Africa and merged them with elements of Christianity and other faiths.
    Crimesider Staff, CBS News, 12 Feb. 2018
  • Despite the protestations of those who felt that the party exploited the spiritual seriousness of Catholic art, the Met’s carpeted steps played host to a syncretic display of contemporary religious visuality.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 8 May 2018
  • Nearby, other larger-than-life-size women feature equally luxuriant tresses, teeming with syncretic mixtures of colorful birds, fireworks, henna designs, snakes, chains, panthers, clenched fists and figures with batons.
    Lori Waxman, chicagotribune.com, 21 June 2017
  • Manfred Eicher, who founded ECM and remains its sole proprietor, has forged a syncretic vision in which jazz and classical traditions intelligently intermingle.
    Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 25 Nov. 2019
  • Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country, has a constitution that recognizes other major religions, and practices a syncretic form of Islam that draws on not just the faith’s tenets but local spiritual and cultural traditions.
    Marco Stahlhut, Time, 19 Aug. 2017
  • Drawing on Native American, Buddhist and mindfulness traditions, her syncretic spiritual practice is fundamental to her work.
    The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Sep. 2020
  • Possessed of a daringly syncretic musical intelligence, Rosalía has inhaled flamenco.
    James Parker, The Atlantic, 21 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'syncretic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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