Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Toynbee was not committed to any one religion. He involved himself deeply in both Christianity and Buddhism but called himself an agnostic. God, he said, was a feeling that "wells up from a deeper level of the psyche." As for man's relationship to that sacred force, Toynbee once used a metaphor from his own dreams. In this dream, he said, he had seen himself holding onto the foot of the crucifix high above the altar of the Benedictine Abbey of Ampleforth in Yorkshire. Then he heard a voice call out in flawless Latin: "Amplexus expecta "-Cling and wait...
That separation has meant that public schools don't teach religion, which in turn has brought about a dissociation of Christian (but not Jewish) religion from intellectual endeavor. American Christians, the dean of the Divinity School says, worship more out of "childlike faith" than scholarly piety...
...moral people are explicitly religious nor are all religious people moral. But the founding leaders no less than the Puritans, connected vice with sin, virtue with godliness. In his Farewell Address, George Washington said of the tie: "Religion and morality are indispensable supports ... great Pillars of human happiness ... [the] firmest props of the duties of Men & citizens ... And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion...
...hunger, political reform, environmental issues, inequalities and injustices, economic traumas. The "decline of absolutes" itself is often merely the result of pluralism. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a pluralistic land?" asked Ethicist Paul Ramsey. Pluralism, the sense that "any number can play," whether in religion or ways of life, will not go away. Father John Courtney Murray called it "the human condition." Every day in every way we are aware that "your" and "my" absolutes sometimes clash. Antiabortionists and pro-abortionists are both sincerely set on "their" absolutes. The resultant moral diversity often does...
Good people, families, humanists, schools, civic institutions, voluntary societies that are untouched by religion are as involved in the search as are those who identify with particular faiths. Many of them have found terms for moral action in their own "colonies" or "tribes," whether these be philosophical and family traditions, racial and ethnic clusters, age and sex groupings, or movements and causes. In recent years moral renewal has occurred more frequently within these colonies and tribes than in their federation, the national community. Voluntary associations, some derived from the churches' "errand of mercy," and some growing out of other...