Word: seculare
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...Civil funerals aren't new. They've been happening in Australia since the mid 1970s and for almost as long in New Zealand. But the proportion of people choosing them is growing fast. Acknowledging "a massive cultural shift" toward secularity in urban Australia, the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Rob Forsyth, predicts secular and religious funerals "will eventually reach a point of equilibrium." While that's probably some years away in most Australian and New Zealand cities and not even close in the bush, celebrants in the more liberal centers of Melbourne and Auckland already conduct substantially more than half...
...regularly feature in-flight ads, in French, for property in Israel. And according to Israeli press reports, tourist trips by French Jews - some clearly exploring immigration - have skyrocketed in recent years. The exodus reflects a genuine crisis in the French psyche. The national dream - in which membership in the secular republic is always more important than ethnic and religious identity - is waking up to an increasingly atomized reality. "A man like Chirac still lives in a republican world," says novelist Michaël Sebban. "When he's confronted by anti-Semitism all he can do is affirm the republican values...
...back with her next installment, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Part one found Satrapi and her family facing and surviving war, revolution, religious oppression and the execution of several loved ones. Part two begins with Satrapi, 14, leaving religious Iran to attend school in "an open and secular Europe," which turns out to be less open than she had first thought...
...this could just be the church's appropriation of Hollywood salesmanship: luring audiences with promises of a movie and some good talk, as the Journey's Searcy offered. Finding a Christian message in secular films like Catwoman and Spider-Man could be either a delusion or, as Jeffrey Overstreet, a critic for Christianity Today says, "a way of affirming that God's truth is inescapable and can be found even in the stories of people who don't believe...
...divided nation, it is said. There is a cultural chasm between the red states and the blue, between the religious and the secular, between Michael Moore's America and Rush Limbaugh's. The "culture war" has become a pillar of the conventional wisdom. But is it real? Is it possible that the great partisan divide is a media-induced mirage, little more than an exaggerated case of squeaky-wheelism? There is plenty of evidence that the very real disputes pushed by political activists and chair-throwing media yakkers--call this the Anger-Industrial Complex--are being carelessly extrapolated to include...