Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...embarrassing open secret that, contrary to his hallowed position in the secular sainthood of freedom, Abraham Lincoln was never a particularly passionate abolitionist. But he freed the slaves, and regardless of his real reasons for signing the Emancipation Proclamation, aren’t we glad he did? Likewise, many scholars maintain that knowledge of Hitler’s escalating program of genocide in Europe had very little to do with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to enter World War II on that continent. Do we care in the slightest that he might have been more concerned with getting...
...Disease Control, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, and even Bush’s first surgeon general, a holdover from the Clinton administration who was summarily downsized after making these comments, has criticized abstinence-only programs and favors more traditional, secular sexual education programs. However, this skepticism about the abstinence crusade extends beyond the medical community. A survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council shows that over 80 percent of low income parents want their children to learn how to use birth control and how to protect against HIV/AIDS...
...Republican lawmakers argue that their goal is merely to fund abstinence education and secular sexual education equally. However, the funding that the administration says goes to “programs that teach about contraception use” is in fact dispersed over groups as varied as teen contraception clinics and HIV/AIDS hotlines, while abstinence funding is geared specifically towards classroom instruction. In addition, Bush has been slowly siphoning funds away from HIV/AIDS prevention programs and into abstinence education...
...past, Pakistani religious parties seldom grabbed more than five percent of the vote. The country's intelligentsia likes to claim this is because, once all the hollering dies down and ballots are cast, Pakistanis are moderate, secular folk. In fact, most Pakistanis are poor, unschooled people who traditionally vote as their feudal squires command?or suffer their wrath. With the two big parties in retreat, the hard-line religious coalition is leading a whole lot of voters to the booths. Polls indicate that the MMA could win 30 to 50 of the 270 National Assembly seats. (Another 70 seats...
...this experience that Rumi's formidable output of poetry began: a catalog that in its surviving form runs to a dozen thick volumes. Rumi's masterpiece, the Mathnawi, is a fantastical, oceanic mishmash of folktales, philosophical speculation and lyric ebullience in which the worldly and the otherworldly, the secular and the sacred, blend constantly. For Rumi, the universe is like a tavern where people, drunk with desire and longing, collect and carouse until they finally remember their true calling: return to an Islamic God whose all-encompassing love is the core of every earthly love from the most trifling...