Word: secularity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...post-Christianity. They are usually young, steeped in the Bible and hip to the latest twists of German hermeneutics, at home both in academe and in the churches of the slum-ridden "inner city." Their theme is the need of the churches to answer the new challenges of secular times; their prose is a never-never blend of Pauline exorcism and plummy sociological jargon. The prophets are sometimes a bit of a nuisance, partly because they are as predictable as the tiny hammers in Anacin ads, and partly because they provide a stream of criticism from within that the churches...
Breeze of Change. And of course, merely asking questions was often to answer them-or at least to indicate how tinny and irrelevant conventional responses of the past were now. Should the church shun the secular world, clinging to the City of God in fear of contamination from the City of Man? That learned teacher Pius XII, as his encyclicals and allocutions make clear, firmly answered no. But Pius, for all his good will, remained a prisoner of the church's past. It was left to John XXIII -neither intellectual nor theologian-to throw open the windows and doors...
Thanks to his charismatic warmth and pliancy, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to change from wariness of new trends in the secular world to acceptance of them. It is not odd, considering the scope and influence of a Pope, that one man seemed to be responsible for it all. What is extraordinary is that the change was visible in the space of one year: 1962. Before that, John had been a puzzling Pope-openly warm and friendly to people, but curiously disappointing and conservative in many of his acts. His apostolic constitution, Veterum Sapientfi, was a brusque warning to those...
...Bollandists are not ecclesiastical muckrakers; they aim to produce sober lives of saints that will stand the scrutiny of secular historians, and are as delighted to authenticate a legend as to disprove one. Well aware that the faithful may be scandalized if a popular saint is summarily debunked, the Bollandists couch damaging discoveries in guarded, hesitant prose. But they also believe that the faith of the church will be all the stronger if it is stripped of implausible legends. Father Coens believes that the "enlightened Christian" should always be "on the alert to protect his sense of fiction and reality...
...consist of faddists and the clique-minded; but most seem to be made up of dedicated Christians who have found that in company with a few fellow believers, they can learn about theology and the Bible and grapple with the concrete problems of living as a Christian in a secular society. Says Lutheran Pastor William R. Snyder, president of the Minneapolis Ministerial Association, and an ardent believer in the efficacy of such cells: "This is the way of the future for the church. We're only using Christ's strategy. He spoke...