Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...best-selling author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, whose crystalline prose gave mainstream audiences a nuanced glimpse into the rarely seen world of religious Jews; of brain cancer; in Merion, Pa. Potok's novels repeatedly addressed the struggle between religious devotion and love for the secular world, a tension he experienced as the son of Orthodox Polish immigrants who deemed his work frivolous. Inspired by the writing of Evelyn Waugh and James Joyce, whom he read on the sly as a teenager, Potok, unlike religious skeptics Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, lovingly depicted the tight-knit...
...face-off. Now more than ever, the world is counting on Musharraf the risk taker--who assures us his risks are calculated--to steer South and Central Asia from internal chaos to regional security, from the threshold of nuclear Armageddon to Pax Pakistania, from fundamentalist fervor to secular moderation...
...popularized way, it's all going to pan out in the end," he says. "It assures them, in the midst of a general cultural breakdown and a time of growing danger, that God is going to redeem the time." Evangelicals who had felt somehow left behind in secular terms, by a coarse culture and a fear of general moral decay, welcome arguments that even the most tragic events may be evidence of God's larger plan. In fact, you don't have to be religious to be hoping for that as well...
Notions of a divinely choreographed end to history are almost as old as Western faith. They appear first in the Jewish Bible's books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The books were edited in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., and secular scholars find an intimate connection between their content and the horrors Jews faced at the time. In 586 B.C., after a brutal siege, the kingdom of Babylon conquered Israel and forced its elite into exile. The prophets defiantly proclaimed the opposite: the establishment over all nations of a Jewish kingdom under a divinely anointed Messiah...
...Alike" [ESSAY, June 10]. Elliott agrees with the assertion of Rohan Gunaratna, author of a scholarly study on al-Qaeda, that Osama bin Laden "never interpreted Islam to assist a given political goal. Islam is his political goal." This idea implies that bin Laden's attempts to undermine secular governments and establish Islamic religious law are not political in nature. While his stated goals include the ouster of U.S. troops from Arab soil and the destruction of Israel, bin Laden uses terrorist means to push his political agenda into areas where people have been disenfranchised by the failure of Islamic...