Word: seculare
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...away for years, and have created new branches of the family they grew up in. This trip into the past may be pleasant or painful. But for most people, whether or not they are practicing Christians, the soundtrack of that wayback machine is Christmas music: the religious and secular tunes, the novelty songs and ballads. Grandma has spun these standards for a half century or more, replacing the 78s with LPs, then cassettes and now CDs. The formats change; the songs and feelings don't. Some time in the next few days, you'll hear Bing Crosby sing "White Christmas...
...richer reminder of how lovely three voices singing as one can sound than this album by the New Jersey sibs: soprano Terre, contralto Maggie and alto Suzzy. The sisters' neo-traditional sound works wonders on a range of Christmas songs. A third of the 24 cuts are of secular songs, including a Caribbean-flavored "Deck the Halls," a "Sleigh Ride" whose percussion is horse-clop tongue clicks and a very heavily Brooklyn-accented "Winter Wonderland." Even the infectious title track has an folk-rocky vibe. Overall, though, the program is liturgical, the tone inspirational, the impact indelible...
...jazz pianist whose voice was too lyrical and intimate to be shut up. He put that silky, highly palatized tenor to splendid use in this collection, which was everybody's second Christmas album. (You couldn't play Bing all the time.) Like Crosby, Cole mixed the religious and the secular songs, his vocals lending a silky cohesion to the enterprise. Best remembered is "The Christmas Song," by Robert Allen and Mel Torme, which Nat first recorded in 1946 and made his own. He had us at "chestnuts...
...great humbling. The most absolutist visionaries found a limit to their certitude. Benedict XVI went in a matter of months from proclaiming an irreducible gulf between Christianity and Islam to visiting a mosque in Turkey with white slippers on his feet. He publicly called for Turkey, a secular state but a Muslim country, to be integrated into the European Union. In the U.S., the religious right saw its most enthusiastic repre sentative in the Senate, Rick Santorum, go down to defeat by a crushing 18 points. For the first time, a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage failed...
...This is highly unfortunate. Religious illiteracy is the norm at our largely secular campus, making it almost impossible for Harvard to converse with a religious world. Furthermore, forgoing the reason and faith requirement will perhaps irretrievably confirm the pragmatic, utilitarian ethos of the task force’s vision for Harvard education, banishing rigorous thought about meaning, purpose, and life’s ultimate questions to an academic never-never land...