Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sperm. But does a collection of cells constitute a human being? Some biologists believe that fertilization does mark the beginning of humanity, since the fertilized egg is a distinct and unique genetic entity. This belief shores up the antiabortion argument of Catholic bishops as well as those of secular pro-life groups. John T. Noonan, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, explains the church's theological position this way: "Once conceived, the being was recognized as man because he had man's potential. The criterion for humanity, .thus, was simple and all-embracing...
Gordon divides The Company of Women into a triptych. Part I begins in 1963 with five middle-aged working women loyally flocking to the weekend retreat of Father Cyprian, an unsentimental, uncompromisingly pure priest who has settled in upstate New York. This is the company of women, secular nuns who kneel before their earthly Savior, whom they depend on for comfort, for succor, for sweetness, for confession. They are prisoners of the vision of God and the light of heaven. They are bound by a hunger for the sacred which Cyprian provides with effusion and fanatical authority...
...depiction of Robert, the radical lecturer in chukka boots, we see Gordon's severest weakness: her drawing of male figures. All her men are foils for her heroines. Incomplete and inconsequential, they serve for Felicitas and Isabel to learn another part of the unvirtuous secular and as love objects for those women who leave the Church. All Gordon's men are childish and petulant, unworthy of love and eventually discarded...
...last week, in Sacramento, Superior Court Judge Irving Perluss heard arguments in Segraves vs. the State of California, a case brought by Kelly Segraves, 38, director of the San Diego-based Creation-Science Research Center. Like most creationists, Segraves maintains that evolution as taught in U.S. schools is a secular religion. Because it is California policy to teach evolution in biology classes without competing views about the divine origin of the universe, Segraves claimed that the religious freedom of his children was violated...
...impossible to fix a date; the roots are too tangled in the subsoil of the 19th century. But one can point to some crucial events of its growth. One of them happened in France in the late 1880s, within a group of painters-some now familiar to us as secular saints or movie heroes, others still relatively ill-known -who kept venturing out of Paris toward more "primitive" places. Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard ranged among the megaliths, the cold heather and the gaunt folk-Christs in Brittany. Vincent van Gogh pursued what he called "the gravity of great sunlight...