Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that it cared to lay hands on; but Europe as an entity did not exist. Charlemagne, a brief beacon in the Dark Ages, headed a "Roman Empire"-with the blessing of a new force for unity, the universal Church. Since then, most of the would-be unifiers have been secular-Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler...
...Enemy. In four years, Communism had established its own Vatican (a shiny, modern office building), its own Pope (Palmiro Togliatti), its own hierarchy of spiritual and secular servants. One of the most important was Luigi ("The Cock") Longo, a man with a sharp, beaked face, who is generalissimo of Italian Communism's army. His partisans, who never surrendered the arms with which they fought the Germans, are estimated at 150,000. Daily, Italian police were finding more of Longo's arms caches; no one knew how many they failed to find. Longo's men face...
...historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as steppingstones to a progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight . . . civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious backsliding from the path of spiritual progress. In our Western world of today, the worship of Leviathan-the self-worship of the tribe -is a religion to which...
...Spiritual Heir. "If this self-criticism is just, then we must revise the whole of our present conception of modern history.. . . Our present view of modern history focuses attention on the rise of our modern Western secular civilization as the latest great new event in the world. ... If we can bring ourselves to think of it, instead, as one of the vain repetitions of the Gentiles-an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Greeks and Romans did before us and did supremely well-then the greatest new event in the history of mankind will be seen...
...rigorously secular mind the total paradox must, like its parts, be "unto the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness." It is not irrational, but it is not the logic of two & two makes four. Theologically, it is the dialectical logic of that trinitarian oneness whose triunity is as much a necessity to the understanding of Godhead as higher mathematics is to the measurement of motion. Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son. "Why do you weep," asked a friend, "since...