Word: secularism
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Neither Christmas Story nor Wonderful Life, though, has an exclusive on the spirit of Christmas. The holiday is full of paradox: sacred and secular, giving and gorging, loving others and suffering them. It's not so bad to get that cornball annual reminder that Bedford Falls needs you. But it's not so terrible either to wonder whether, sometimes, you'd be better off without Bedford Falls...
...What Terrorists Want” lays out a fascinating and illuminating history that takes the reader from the first-century Jewish struggle against the Romans to al Qaeda’s jihad against America. A picture of terrorism emerges that stretches from Indonesia to Germany and embraces both secular and religious causes. Perhaps the most profound facet of Richardson’s work is her documentation of the continuity of terrorism.Despite the breadth of terrorist groups that Richardson examines, she is able to isolate terrorism as the preferred means for weak sub-state groups to challenge powerful geopolitical entities. Richardson...
...inefficiency, ethnic and religious rivalry - that he had promised to combat. Questions about Abdullah's leadership came to the fore earlier this year when his deputy, Najib Razak, stunned the country by defining Malaysia as an Islamic state, going so far as to say the country had never been secular. (The nation's constitution is unclear about the issue, stating both that Islam is the religion of the federation and that freedom of religion is guaranteed.) Abdullah told TIME, "We are not a secular state, but neither are we a theocracy." But such hedging seems unlikely to satisfy all constituencies...
...every community gets a seat at the table when it comes to governing the country," he told TIME. "Everyone participates, and everyone's voice is heard." Many non-Malays don't agree - and their sense of alienation starts early. Government primary schools that used to be essentially secular now feature Islamic prayer halls. Today, only 6% of Chinese parents send their children to such schools, while in the 1970s more than half did. Chinese students have a much harder time securing places in Malaysia's public universities because of quotas, so those with sufficient funds head overseas. Many...
Attending a secular university presents difficulties in religious students’ daily routines, but it often also reinforces their faith, student group leaders said at a panel discussion yesterday. The panelists, who represented Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish student organizations, also discussed how students manage to balance religious and academic commitments, and how they maintain their faith in classrooms that sometimes challenge it. “I remember sitting there listening to them say religion was just a means of cooperation,” former Harvard Hillel vice president Joshua C. Wertheimer ’08 said, recalling...