Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...parents of the Bridgeport Baptist Academy and the Sheridan Road Christian School, both near Saginaw, had charged that attempts by the state's board of education to supervise curriculum and teacher qualifications violated their religious freedom. Judge Ray Hotchkiss agreed, ruling that the board, by imposing its secular standards of education on religious schooling, "interfered with plaintiffs' constitutional right to freely exercise their religion." Said Hotchkiss: "This court fails to see a compelling state interest in requiring nonpublic schools to be of the 'same standard' as public schools in the same district. Such a scheme does...
...participate in or promote the Christian celebration of Christmas," explained Judge Hugh Bownes in the Pawtucket case. "The crèche is purely a Christian religious symbol; this is the distinction between the crèche and Christmas as a holiday." Christmas trees, for example, are generally considered secular because of their origins in pagan rituals. Public school Christmas pageants have won court approval as long as the cultural significance outweighed the religious...
This same force is now propelling the proponents of prayer in the schools. If every schoolchild in America attended church, it would be illogical to put prayer in an institution of secular education. The problem, if course, is that the religious are trying to use the government's system of public schools to imbue some Americans with a message they will not come to church to hear...
...full of references to other art, usually of a rather arcane sort. But they seem casually, even inattentively deployed, coming out not as formal homages to this or that master but as a function of temperament. Like Bonnard, whose work he reveres, Hodgkin is a fidgety peeper into secular paradises and controllable realms of pleasure. But as befits a painter who makes no bones about his belief in the continuity of past and present, part of the pleasure lies in the conversation between his work and its sources...
...idea that then-educational system has a moral purpose. It is an idea common to both the Greeks and the medieval church ("O Lord my King," St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, "whatsoever I speak or write, or read, or number, let all serve Thee"). In a secular age, the moral purpose of education takes secular forms: racial integration, sex education, good citizenship. At the college level, the ambiguities become more complex. Should a morally objectionable person be allowed to teach? (Not Timothy Leary, said Harvard.) Should a morally objectionable doctrine be permitted? (Not Arthur Jensen's claims...