Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Especially in Sydney, we still tend to embrace the disreputable. Organized religion doesn't play one-tenth the part in Australian life that it does in American; the churches have power, but compared with the U.S. our civilization is almost entirely secular. Our state-sponsored education is excellent, and we do not give a cent in subsidies to church schools. And we have fierce democratic commitments that hardly exist in America. It is, for example, a (lightly) punishable offense not to vote in a national election. As for campaign contributions, and all the corruption and perversion of democracy that...
...when pop culture raises the dead, it also raises a tension between faith and logic. Even for the secular, accepting death often involves a belief, absent proof, about the undiscovered country beyond life. These programs fill a hunger, sneered at by hip media insiders, for soul food, but they also risk oversimplifying an eternal conundrum. Offering easy evidence of something beyond, however heartwarming, runs counter to faith. And faith--religious or otherwise--is all most of us have to make do with...
...accord is not reached with Israel by that date. The failure of last month's peace talks at Camp David stung both Barak and Arafat, and left many doubtful that an agreement could ever be reached. Now Barak appears to be signaling that Israel could be adopting a more secular tone, in the hope that the Palestinians will offer equitable concessions. And though this may seem like political suicide - Barak runs the daily risk of losing his position to a Likud-led no-confidence vote - he can claim two key factors in his favor: The Palestinians would rather deal with...
...soul of American Jewry. It has torn asunder families, communities and congregations," he writes. He describes the embarrassment and rage felt by more liberal Jews at Yale University when some Orthodox students sued to avoid living in co-ed dorms; the dismay of the alumni of a secular Jewish summer camp in New York State upon discovering that their alma mater had been supplanted by the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey; and the pressures that drove a troubled Orthodox gas-station cashier in Jacksonville, Fla., to plant a bomb (nonoperative, he claims from prison) in a Conservative synagogue attended...
...Secular Jews, for whom Jewishness is little more than a form of ethnicity, identity or perhaps just racial memory, have long been accepted in the American mainstream. Why, Jerry Seinfeld--the quintessential nominal Jew who quite cheerfully acknowledges his Jewishness but finds it so devoid of meaning that it plays no role whatsoever in his life--became the most popular figure in American popular culture. The embrace of Jews is so thorough that Irving Kristol once noted wryly regarding the alarming rates of Jewish assimilation, "The problem is that they don't want to persecute us, they want to marry...