Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...candy canes in its windows at Christmastime-but how about stars and angels? Questions like this have become pertinent since the Supreme Court's 1962 school-prayer decision. But they are difficult to answer. Unable to define a consistent policy toward what is both a religious and a secular holiday and a major event in Western culture, most school officials have adopted a hands-off policy. They generally leave principals and teachers free to organize whatever parties, pageants and other observances they think appropriate. When the school administration in Marblehead, Mass., tried to become more precise, the result...
...remained a bastion of authoritarian conservatism. Classes consisted of dry lectures in Latin, with no chance for student participation. Seminarians had virtually no lives of their own. They could leave their residence only in groups, and could never enter a store or restaurant. They could not take secular newspapers. They could not even wear trousers; instead, the members of the more than 200 scattered residential colleges, representing 78 countries, wore colored cassocks, each color denoting a different nationality, and round, flat hats...
...Elect of God. America has presumed itself to be God's chosen remnant, to the point where it very nearly subscribes to the anthropocentric heresy of Pelagius, the 5th century Christian ascetic who argued that man could gain salvation without divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that it is not and cannot be evil at the center. We habitually believe that American intentions are good ones, that America has never started...
...Puritan ethos was a stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism-the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil-although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed-like...
...BEGAN, Cox took a picture of the Secular City and found it wanting. Now he is aiding us in our attempt to live with the Christian paradox: i. e., to live with God, celebrate our humanity with Him at the same time that we search...