Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Falwell himself marches into the secular world with his chin outthrust. Unlike the many electronic ministers who flee direct questioning, Falwell challenges hostile outsiders. He travels 8,000 miles a week, lashing out at abortion, pornography and homosexuality. He has been to Harvard to duel with jeering students who spilled over into three auditoriums to hear him, and to Oxford to debate Prime Minister David Lange of New Zealand about nuclear weapons. He dares Scientist Carl Sagan to debate creationism; Sagan has declined the challenge. He has a private session with South Africa's President P.W. Botha and sides publicly...
...board meetings in Hillsboro, Mo., as they demand to control curriculum; force doctors to stop performing abortions in Virginia Beach, Va.; march in San Antonio streets to protest sex channels on cable TV. The shelves of religious bookstores are filled with their social protests, in which the buzz words "secular humanism" are used to cover anything and everything the authors disapprove of. The Fundamentalists "have moved into the center of America's cultural stage," says Baptist Pastor William Hull of Shreveport, La., who is unsympathetic to them...
...three opinions appeared to weaken a major rule announced in the 1971 case of Lemon vs. Kurtzman. But in all the newest religion cases, the court forcefully reaffirmed its commitment to the Lemon test, which makes three demands on any religiously oriented legislation: that it have a secular purpose, that it neither advance nor inhibit religion and that it avoid "excessive entanglement" between government and religion. Justice Brennan's application of the test in the New York school case left officials in what dissenting Justice William Rehnquist called a "catch-22." City school officials argued that they took special care...
...from far more radical and fundamentalist Shi'ite factions, especially a group called Hizballah (Party of God), which has strong ties to Iran. Although Assad's relations with Iran are friendly, he has no desire to see Lebanon become a Shi'ite theocracy that might eventually oppose his own secular form of rule...
...these secular times, it is the state that claims, "Vengeance is mine," and insists on the sole right to decide what is just and to impose punishment. Any personal attempt at retribution is dismissed as vengeance, and vengeance is dismissed as psychotic, almost taboo. Yet as Susan Jacoby points out in her interesting book Wild Justice, vengeance comes to appear necessary when the state (or the gods) fails to provide justice...