Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...also not terribly enthused—though I am rather amused—by the implications of that truism. What it means is that the more religious among us are likely to be in officially-condoned sexual relationships at an earlier age than the secular. Maybe it’s just my own frustration speaking here, but isn’t there something…wrong with that? If one of the driving forces behind the postponement of sex until marriage is that sex is risky, powerful and potentially sacred territory, then in some ways it makes more sense...
...leaders in Australia's history have been bold enough to orchestrate a sharp turn in school funding policy. In 1880, when less than a third of New South Wales children received schooling, the state's premier, Henry Parkes, pushed through the Public Instruction Act, establishing free, secular and compulsory education. Grand stuff; but by simultaneously withdrawing all aid from denominational schools, Parkes caused almost a century of community division...
Last weekend, replicating a Sunday-morning ritual of my secular youth, I bought a copy of The New York Times. I brought it back to my common room, and eventually my roommates drifted in and rifled through the paper to find the good sections. When we were draped over futon and chair and carpet, reading each other passages from the paper—“Hey, can you believe what Condoleeza Rice said?”—it reminded me of those childhood Sunday mornings, except with less competition for the sports section. When I glanced...
...exhort their rank and file to slaughter Iraqis cooperating with the U.S. and the interim government. On one tape, a man named Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, one of al-Zarqawi's key commanders and a member of the organization's religious committee, preaches that any nation built on secular principles is "in the light of Islamic law a tyrannical infidel and blasphemous state." Anyone associated with it, he continues--especially soldiers and police, whether or not they are good Muslims--may be murdered, as "they do not represent themselves; they are means in the hands of the tyrants." Even...
...home to 135,000 U.S. troops: Iraq. Among the many unintended consequences of this war is that some of the most harrowing terrorist acts being carried out in the name of Islam are taking place in a country the U.S. had hoped to transform into a model of secular democracy in the Middle East. The chances that Iraq will resemble that ideal soon are all but gone. The danger now is that control could slip into the hands of jihadists--as parts of the so-called Sunni triangle already have--intent on establishing their own fundamentalist regime that could become...