Word: secularity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...curse onstage. I arrived at the college-campus-size Orange County church on a Saturday afternoon. After being taught various improv games with the five members of the troupe, none of which involved the Bible or moral lessons, I asked them what the difference was between secular and Christian improv. "We're dirtier," said Jeremy Bryan Barnes. Then he explained why they weren't doing Christian comedy. "When we started, we'd get requests from groups to do jokes about Noah. But it wasn't fun. We'd work too hard to work in Noah...
...when Kevin Roose, author of the excellent new book The Unlikely Disciple, told me that Rick Warren's giant Saddleback Church has its own improv group, for the first time in my life, I felt my calling. I may not be the Woody Allen or Jon Stewart of the secular world, but in the land of the unfunny Christian, the one-joked Jew is king. (See pictures of John 3:16 in pop culture...
...democracy gap with Baghdad," says Quil Lawrence, author of Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East. "After years of counting on American support because of its pro-Western, secular and, most importantly, pro-democratic image, the Kurdish parliament looks like a rubber stamp shared by the two main parties. Arab Iraq had peaceful provincial elections in January in which some entrenched parties lost and stepped down quietly. The Kurds need to show they can do the same." The Kurds, who speak a different language and are a separate ethnic group from their...
...acted out by non-Muslims, is a direct legacy of centuries of Sufi devotional poetry. At Sufism's core, suggests Oxford University's Devji, is an embrace of the world. "It allows you to identify beyond your mosque and village to something that can be both Islamic and secular," he says. "It's a liberation that jihadis could never offer...
...Pendulum Swings The Islamic revival in Bosnia is classic human nature [June 15]. The Bosnian Muslims had a mainly secular sense of identity but were nevertheless brutalized during the Balkan civil war due to their religion, for there is little else to differentiate Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks. In reaction, the generation that grew up during the horror of the war is boldly reclaiming the religious identity for which they were victimized. At the other end of the spectrum is Iran, where religious observance is declining in the generation that came of age under the Islamic Republic. The young there...