Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Stendahl says he is sad, in a way, to see what is happening to the Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) degree in the United States. Scholars here want Ph.D.s, traditionally the highest degrees for intellectuals; and universities hiring theological scholars prefer Ph.D.s to Th.D.s because the secular degree is better known and more widely accepted...
...faith in the future that once characterized the U.S. Neuhaus contends that if Americans lose the belief that God is working toward a culmination, history is seen as purposeless. He worries that America's intellectual leaders are so "emancipated" from religion that spiritual questions are cloaked in secular terms like "national purpose." Thus discussion of public policy is "floundering in moral evasiveness and mendacity." Neuhaus scorns the "vulgar anti-Americanism" of many intellectuals and says that because they are divorced from the American experience, they feel no need to repent personally of the nation's sins...
Besides the secular intellectuals, Neuhaus has little regard for those religious intellectuals who are still "obsequiously accommodating to cultural moods" rather than asserting "religious truth claims." A dramatic protest against such cultural entrapment of theology was fashioned by a group that Neuhaus and his friend, Sociologist Peter Berger, assembled in Hartford, Conn., last winter (TIME, Feb. 10). Neuhaus and his Hartford colleagues last month concluded a second meeting, at which a book of essays was planned to follow up their "Hartford Appeal." As he has done in his current book, Neuhaus will call for a "reconstruction" of American theology, which...
...other hand, some Jews and Christians, like the placard-carrying fundamentalists in Los Angles last week, say that TM, despite its claims to being purely secular, is really Hinduism in disguise. Their argument has at least some merit, and though the ordinary meditator sees traces of religion only in the initiation ceremony, the rites for TM teachers are permeated with Hindu words and symbols...
...standing, in his words, "in the heart of this university..." A maddening juxtaposition of the past-and-present always leads to extremist conclusions. Thus for Rabbi Gold Harvard can redress past injuries to Jews only through parity of status for Judaism--a parity that extends, alas, even to the secular sphere of the Harvard calendar, for it is not enough for Harvard to provide an alternative registration day for religious Jewish students...