Word: seculare
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...essential for the public good. Parents, educators, business people and politicians everywhere are forming grass-roots coalitions to raise standards and improve the quality of instruction from kindergarten to senior year. Their vigor is bringing a new vitality to education, the institution that has been called America's secular religion. Says Terrel Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education: "There is currently in progress the greatest, most far-reaching and, I believe, the most promising reform and renewal of education we have seen since the turn of the century...
...during the 18th century Enlightenment, and amid fundamentalist revivals, humanists of the 20th century still feel it today. Parents may push their children to get good grades and go to church on Sunday, but any disciple of the Divinity School can tell you that the connection between religious and secular education is, at best, tenuous...
Brill's determination to unite religious and secular knowledge, a goal spawned during his unusually eventful childhood in France, is the guiding theme of the novel. Brill is the archetypal child prodigy, spending more time learning Taahnit from his rabbi and making telescopic observations than running in the street playing stickball. The young Brill's diligence naturally leads him to--among other places--the Sorbonne, where, like the prototypical Harvard student, he learns to "think big," Perhaps too big for his own good...
...best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love." Years of loneliness have strengthened his faith and given him a sense of how his marriage failed: "Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks...
These works, and the other 74 tales in the collection, have become secular cabala, subject to endless sifting and interpretation. Hermann Hesse judged Kafka's works "an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence." W.H. Auden called Kafka "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs." André Gide did not know what to admire most, "the naturalistic presentation of an imaginary world, or the daring turn to the mysterious." But Edmund Wilson was not ready to admire either: "Kafka is being wildly...