Word: communal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most of the College’s history, Harvard freshmen tended to arrive from a small number of elite prep schools, knowing each other and their families quite well. Most were Protestants, and so Harvard had a daily chapel. But as meritocracy gained traction within the admissions process, the communal institutions that were natural outgrowths of students’ homogeneity became outdated. In a revolutionary move in 1886, University President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, abolished the daily chapel service. The great books controversies of the 1960s removed any shared requirement of a general education. The point, of course...
...stand. The U.S. routinely collects minutely detailed information to gauge the vitality of its economy. This new index is the beginning of an effort to do the same for its civic life. With this data, we can begin to seriously debate and ultimately fashion robust policies to fix our communal machinery. Local groups can tap it to build awareness, and national service programs, such as AmeriCorps, can use it to hone recruiting. With just a little focus and effort, our civic health can change course...
...Christians in an Age of Hunger, a fringe classic after its publication in 1977, is selling far more copies now, and some young people are even acting on its rather radical prescriptions: a sprinkling of Protestant groups known loosely as the New Monastics is experimenting with the kind of communal living among the poor that had previously been the province of Catholic orders. Jim Wallis, longtime leader of one such community in Washington and the editor of Sojourners magazine, has achieved immense exposure lately with his pleas that Evangelicals engage in more political activism on behalf of the poor...
...female uncleanliness as a form of rabbinical sexism, some see the new and improved mikvah as a sign of respect. "There's great power here," says Slonim. "As a celebration of a woman's cycle, as part of a sacred rhythm of intimacy and fertility, and on the communal level of women taking care of each other. It's marvelous...
...mostly Sunni neighborhood where insurgents and terrorists are known to frequently hide out. At night soldiers in Old MoD - the base is named after the former offices of the Iraqi ministry of defense - can hear gunfire from both neighborhoods. Also close at hand is powerful proof of the communal carnage: when the wind blows in the wrong direction the soldiers smell the corpses overflowing from a nearby morgue...