Word: secularity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...appear to be eight years into another of those long, secular bear markets like the one from 1965 to 1982, or 1929 to 1949. If you're looking for a bottom, an end to the pain, you're very likely to be disappointed. "Bear markets behave rather like Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon strip," Phil Coggan writes in this week's Economist. "Just when Charlie Brown is persuaded to attempt to kick the football, she snatches it away...
...halt in proceedings and prompting a judge to be removed from the case. The defendants--including retired generals, journalists and lawyers--are charged with belonging to a secret group called Ergenekon, which prosecutors say planned a campaign of violence to oust a leadership it saw as threatening Turkey's secular constitution...
...soul. In the Internet age, it turns out, it is also good for Web traffic. In the past few years, a growing number of websites have popped up offering visitors a chance to anonymously post, read and, in some cases, comment on people's deepest and darkest secrets. Originally secular, the sites, with names like DailyConfession.com and GroupHug.us, have even inspired some pastors to adopt the online confessional to engage congregants...
...sites, online confessions have a fundamental appeal because they assure people that they are not alone in their misery or quirkiness, and for the confessor, the anonymous unburdening can be a first step toward facing up to a painful event. Frank Warren started the original online confessional, the distinctly secular PostSecret.com--which draws 5 million viewers a month--as an art installation in Washington. He handed out self-addressed postcards to strangers and asked them to write and decorate a secret that a) was true and b) had not yet been told to anyone. He ended up receiving hundreds...
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the question of whether using God, even symbolically, as a political tool within the courts is appropriate for a secular legal system. Though the case was summarily dismissed, the very fact that the complaint was heard at all involved an implicit state acknowledgement of the existence of God. Given cases like the 2005 Supreme Court decision banning a public display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky (although a similar decision allowed a monument in Texas on historical grounds), we may call the introduction of the (specifically Christian) divine into American jurisprudence a clear...