Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book captured the popular theological mood of the '60s better than Harvey Cox's The Secular City. "Men must be called away from their fascination with other worlds-astrological, metaphysical or religious-and summoned to confront the concrete issues of this one," wrote Cox, a professor of religion at Harvard Divinity School. His call for social involvement was a capstone to decades of religious this-worldliness. Ever since Theologian Walter Rauschenbusch began to preach his social gospel at the end of the 19th century, there had been a growing feeling in U.S. Protestantism that religion...
...Eugene Smith, of the World Council of Churches, finds a considerable religious ferment in Europe, although "it just doesn't take the same form that it does in America. The deepest grappling with faith," he says, "takes place in the secular context-the theater, literature and film. Secularism has gone much further in Europe than it has in America." At the same time, he notes a surprising degree of "tribalism" in the minds of many Europeans. When the World Council allocated $500,000 in 1970 to support African liberation movements, for example, it received virulent criticism. "The European churches...
...second half of Lemmings is a brilliantly sustained rock parody called the Woodshuck Festival. One million young people have gathered to "off" themselves (commit suicide) in mass protest. But first they hear from their secular gods. Joan Baez (Mary-Jennifer Mitchell) takes the mike holding babe in arms: "Pull the triggers, niggers, we're with you all the way...just across the Bay...I'm the world's Madonna...I'm needed from Belfast to Bangladesh...
More reasonable complaints include a shortage of jobs comparable to those that the Jews had in Russia, poor housing, inadequate cultural facilities and the easygoing permissiveness of life in modern secular Israel. Although most of the disenchanted emigrants are not religiously observant, they were shocked that a Jewish state would tolerate nudity in films and bikini-clad Sabra girls on beaches. They were also upset by the permissiveness of Israeli schools. Mamishvalov sums it up succinctly: "No discipline. Children shout. Teacher has skirts to here; boys in class look there. Teacher smokes. This is not education...
...life begins. Philosopher Hans Jonas, who teaches at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, emphasizes rather that "a mother-to-be is more than her individual self. She carries a human trust, and we should not make abortion merely a matter of her own private wish." A secular ethicist, Jonas believes that society has a "social responsibility" toward pregnant women: it must protect the "mission of motherhood against the clamors of individuals or of social movements. To give this mission over completely to individual choice oversteps the order of nature." Others disagree. According to Reform Rabbi Israel Margolies...