Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love." Years of loneliness have strengthened his faith and given him a sense of how his marriage failed: "Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks...
Your report "Hooliganism in the Holy City" [June 27], describing the animosity and battles between Jerusalem's extreme Orthodox Jewish groups and secular Israelis, bespeaks an inherent antireligious bias. You use the term ultra (meaning extreme or fanatical), to refer to Orthodox Jews only. Yet certainly those officials who arranged for the production of Handel's Messiah in the heart of a Jerusalem Orthodox community may rightfully be termed ultrasecular. So, too, are those who intentionally defy both "God's law" and local ordinances, by driving their cars through Hasidic communities when they are closed to vehicular...
...division between Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel is ridiculous. Unfortunately, to make this situation worse, any moderates who voice an opinion in the dispute are considered repulsive by both sides...
These works, and the other 74 tales in the collection, have become secular cabala, subject to endless sifting and interpretation. Hermann Hesse judged Kafka's works "an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence." W.H. Auden called Kafka "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs." André Gide did not know what to admire most, "the naturalistic presentation of an imaginary world, or the daring turn to the mysterious." But Edmund Wilson was not ready to admire either: "Kafka is being wildly...
...goals of the Reagan Administration has been to provide financial relief for parents sending children to private schools. But even the plan's most fervent supporters have worried that it might not withstand a constitutional challenge. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld laws permitting states to provide secular textbooks to both private and public schools and to pay for transporting students to private as well as public academies, it has regularly struck down other forms of aid. Reason: since so many private schools are connected to a religion, most public assistance leads to a forbidden entanglement of church...