Word: seculare
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Speaking at a New York City meeting of Coalition of Conscience, a Democratic political action group, the Senator argued that on issues such as abortion, school prayer and homosexuality "the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law." He warned that "we cannot be a tolerant country if churches bless some candidates as God's candidates-and brand others as ungodly or immoral." The logical separation between private morality...
...Catholic view is based on a general respect for all human life, but it does not depend exclusively on the belief that a separate human being appears at the instant of conception. The teaching is that precisely because no one knows when the soul enters the body (or in secular terms, when the fetus becomes a person), the baby-to-be should be given the benefit of the doubt and be fully protected. One blunt analogy: no one would think it morally correct to heave a grenade into a room that is probably empty but just might have a human...
...Charlotte, N.C., was filled with more than 3,300 well-groomed parishioners and visitors. At the lectern, Republican Senator Jesse Helms, avatar of the Moral Majority, gazed out approvingly at the congregation. These were Helms' kind of people: religious, conservative, white. "We live in a time when secular humanism is demanding that our nation divest itself of religion," intoned Helms. "There is a cacophony of voices-political, news media, television, movies-mocking the very moral and spiritual base from which America came to be a great nation." The speech was typical of Helms' campaign style: short and calculated...
...long been his custom, the Pope had strong words to offer on secular issues. At Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he declared that "every people should fashion its own economic and social development," tacit encouragement for activist native groups haggling with the Canadian government in Ottawa. At a wildly enthusiastic youth rally in Montreal's Olympic Stadium, hundreds of dancers arrayed themselves before the Pope in the form of a dove. He urged the festive audience, "Have the courage to resist the dealers in deception who make you pay dearly for a moment of 'artificial paradise...
...Catholic seminary in Louvain, however, Conrad is unsettled by the fierce theological disputes that follow in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1962. When a confused fellow seminarian from Brazil quits before ordination, Conrad follows him into the secular world and, ultimately, to Brazil. In Lydia Davis' evocative translation, the pages Detrez devotes to Rio de Janeiro's celebrated carnival constitute a showpiece of brilliant costumes, seductive rhythms and collective madness. On occasion, the prose becomes as overheated as the event: "Three million men and women ... shouted, drank, pinched one another, capered about and formed snakes...