Word: seculare
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...right when it comes to the peace process. Shas quit the Cabinet in July because Barak wouldn't advise the party leadership of his plans for the Camp David summit with President Bill Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak's response was to call for a "secular revolution" that would end the Orthodox rabbis' lock on institutions like marriage and allow civil weddings. And though most observers believe Barak was just looking for political leverage, it's clear that the balance of God and power in Israel--always a subtext in political exchanges--is teetering again...
...last month with a prayer and some Scripture, but no one wanted to pounce the moment the first Jewish national candidate mentioned God. That was before he cited George Washington's admonition last week to never suppose that "morality can be maintained without religion"--as if agnostics, atheists and secular humanists are by definition immoral--and called for the nation to renew its dedication to "God and God's purpose...
...just as the old order in the West was giving way to new notions of God, the state and the citizen. His response--a wholesale rejection of modernity--dominated Catholicism for almost a century after his death and continues to color its present. A true reactionary who saw the secular state, and indeed civil rights, as satanic manifestations, he made it difficult for generations of believers to claim intellectual independence or integrity. Says journalist-historian Garry Wills, who savages Pius in his best seller Papal Sins: "He was a disaster, and his influence has been bad ever since...
...Especially in Sydney, we still tend to embrace the disreputable. Organized religion doesn't play one-tenth the part in Australian life that it does in American; the churches have power, but compared with the U.S. our civilization is almost entirely secular. Our state-sponsored education is excellent, and we do not give a cent in subsidies to church schools. And we have fierce democratic commitments that hardly exist in America. It is, for example, a (lightly) punishable offense not to vote in a national election. As for campaign contributions, and all the corruption and perversion of democracy that...
...when pop culture raises the dead, it also raises a tension between faith and logic. Even for the secular, accepting death often involves a belief, absent proof, about the undiscovered country beyond life. These programs fill a hunger, sneered at by hip media insiders, for soul food, but they also risk oversimplifying an eternal conundrum. Offering easy evidence of something beyond, however heartwarming, runs counter to faith. And faith--religious or otherwise--is all most of us have to make do with...