Word: rationalist
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...Writing an introduction to a posthumous collection of Trilling’s essays in 2000, Leon Wieseltier praised the literary critic—along with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—for remaining clear-eyed in dark times, a “rationalist with night vision.” It’s worth noting that David Brooks also invokes Niebuhr in a New York Times column this week discussing Obama’s “Christian realism,” and that Obama himself has referred to Niebuhr as his “favorite...
...Public gaffes like that one may explain the anti-Catholic backlash driving similar movements elsewhere in the world. In October last year, Italy's Union of Rationalist Atheist and Agnostics sponsored the country's first-ever "De-baptism Day," when the no-longer faithful attended protests and passed out de-baptism forms to areligious people who didn't have internet connections to download them. More recently, on March 2, atheists and feminists in Argentina teamed up to launch the "Not in my Name" Internet campaign which encourages Roman Catholics to notify their local bishops of their desire to officially leave...
...these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers. I find that an old friend of mine in the city, once a strident atheist and rationalist, is getting absorbed in Jewish mysticism; he tells me approvingly that his wife has rejected "Western" medicine and now goes to a medicine man in Chinatown for roots and crystals...
...Blair Wish Project Tony Blair's commitment to a rapprochement of the world's great faiths through interfaith dialogue cannot succeed [June 9]. The world's great religions - and why exclude rationalist humanism from such a dialogue, when it takes as much faith to be an atheist as it does to believe in a deity? - may possibly have the common denominator of desiring the charitable amelioration of the human condition, but that is where the commonality ends. The various belief systems are committed to truth claims which are not logically compatible. Incommensurability of theory necessarily leads to incompatibility in practice...
...speech “Faith in America” sought to unite believing voters, in his own 2006 signature speech on religion and public life Senator Obama called for a coalition of progressives, both believers and secularists. Obama possesses the unique perspective as a lifelong rationalist and recent convert to speak sincerely to all Americans...