Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your account of the Methodist Church and profile of one of our illustrious leaders, Bishop Kennedy, was eminently accurate. The obligation upon the churches to be relevant to the age is rightly emphasized; but that does not mean descending to the secular plane-"softening" its teachings to win acceptance...
...apparently, Negroes are none of these. So, coupled with non-violent strategy and passive self-defense are belief in evolution and providence: all based on unjustified faiths. Actually, Negro protests are no longer Christian non-violent protests. They are essentially humanistic and violent; while Negroes clamor or haltingly seek secular explanations for them...
...just about every Sunday of the year he finds a vacant pulpit to preach from. His sermons are a far cry from the stem-winding exercises in dour purple prose that 19th century congregations loved. His language is spare and unchurchy, larded with wit and timely references to the secular world around him. Yet his message is always related more to eternal truths than to the morning's headlines...
Bishop Robinson, speaking to a large audience in Sanders Theatre, and later to a small reception, stated that ours is "a genuinely and unashamedly secular world." In such an age, he asked, if a man is to become a Christian, "has he got to abandon the modern world for the equivalent of the medieval?" Christianity, he charged, has become too closely attached to particular descriptions of God which were helpful in the past but which seem incredible to many people today...
...Nothing quite equals the secular newsmagazine for giving a fresh perspective to things religious. Continue such exposure: the preachers may learn why multitudes of thinking people cannot stomach the churches, and the laity will surely come to demand more responsible thinking by the clergy. In our time, Christianity needs nothing so much as the courage to base its outlook squarely upon reason applied to the observable facts of human experience, rather than upon the imaginative speculation of past ages...