Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardly the cry of a skeptic, but it was ample grounds for the Emperor to put Luther under sentence of death as a heretic. Instead of being executed, Luther lived for another 25 years, became a major author and composer of hymns, father of a bustling household and a secular figure who opposed rebellion-in all, a commanding force in European affairs. In the years beyond, the abiding split in Western Christendom developed, including a large component of specifically "Lutheran" churches that today have 69 million adherents in 85 nations...
...stories of supernatural powers arise from the days when he was a God-haunted youth alternately studying sacred works and trembling at the revelations of Dostoyevsky: "I suffered deep crises, was subject to hallucinations. My dreams were filled with demons, ghosts, devils, corpses." His fascination with the secular began with his brother's apostasy. Recalled Israel: "I could gather more from one person than from a thousand holy books. I fled from these books and slaked my thirst for life among ... the common people whose lives seemed so round and complete...
...essential for the public good. Parents, educators, business people and politicians everywhere are forming grass-roots coalitions to raise standards and improve the quality of instruction from kindergarten to senior year. Their vigor is bringing a new vitality to education, the institution that has been called America's secular religion. Says Terrel Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education: "There is currently in progress the greatest, most far-reaching and, I believe, the most promising reform and renewal of education we have seen since the turn of the century...
...during the 18th century Enlightenment, and amid fundamentalist revivals, humanists of the 20th century still feel it today. Parents may push their children to get good grades and go to church on Sunday, but any disciple of the Divinity School can tell you that the connection between religious and secular education is, at best, tenuous...
Brill's determination to unite religious and secular knowledge, a goal spawned during his unusually eventful childhood in France, is the guiding theme of the novel. Brill is the archetypal child prodigy, spending more time learning Taahnit from his rabbi and making telescopic observations than running in the street playing stickball. The young Brill's diligence naturally leads him to--among other places--the Sorbonne, where, like the prototypical Harvard student, he learns to "think big," Perhaps too big for his own good...