Word: secularism
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...house on a man who seemed to many a most unlikely Labor leader. At 49, Rudd was not only young but inexperienced: he'd been in Parliament for just eight years and shadow Foreign Minister for less than five. He was an active Christian in a resolutely secular party, and said the machinations of Labor's factional power-brokers "revolted" him. Known as Pixie for his fresh looks, and Dr Death for his cold stare of disapproval, Rudd was said to have few friends in Canberra. Former Labor leaders Paul Keating and Mark Latham described him, respectively, as "a menace...
Obaidat is lucky. The zoo where he works is regarded as the one place in Jerusalem where Muslims, Christians, secular Jews in shorts and tank tops and ultra-Orthodox Jews wearing their 18th century finery all co-exist happily; director general Shai Doron thinks that's because the presence of other animals reminds visitors that despite their differences, they are all members of the same species. And Doron has no tolerance for ultra-Orthodox visitors who demand that he fire Arabs in the cafeteria because they might be plotting to poison Jews...
...several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I'm Unique and Unrepeatable, set to the tune of Ten Little Indians, instead of traditional Sunday-school songs like Jesus Loves Me. Rather than listen to a Bible story, the class read Stone Soup, a secular parable of a traveler who feeds a village by making a stew using one ingredient from each home...
...down a corned beef sandwich the size of her head. And she wasn’t planning to convert anytime soon. The summer ended and I returned to “G-d-less Harvard.” With class selection and academia, my first week back was quite secular, aside from forays to Hillel for the best food on campus. But my interest in the Bible was rekindled when I decided to take a course on the literature of the medieval world. Reading about Paul’s journey to the Third Heaven and the Apocalypse, I came...
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...