Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Israel is a country premised on a paradox. It is an avowedly secular state established to promote Jewish national life, to turn the Jews, in other words, into an autonomous people like the French or the Germans. At the same time it is a Jewish state which takes as its charter the preservation and propagation of a distinctively Jewish history and heritage. And therein lies the problem...
...presidential campaign. Sheik Mahfoud Nahnah, 53, the avuncular leader of the moderate fundamentalist Hamas party (unconnected to the Palestinian group of the same name) came in second with 25% of the vote. Nahnah's designer suits and silk ties, like his campaign pleas for democracy, failed to reassure secular Algerians. His alleged links to Saudi Arabia and his desire to bring the banned F.I.S. back into the mainstream aroused fears that he planned to make Algeria an Islamic republic by stealth...
Evangelical novels are brought out mostly by religious publishers located outside the publishing capital of New York City. The books typically cost less than popular secular fiction. Other differences are hard to miss. Sex is not allowed below the eyes. (Fraught gazes carry great weight here, not only conveying love and affection but also standing in for dialogue in dicey situations.) There are no curses or smut, of course, but also no plain-spoken nouns and verbs denoting body parts or functions. Above all, no humor. No jokes, no kidding, no double meanings, no quirks and certainly no irony...
Robertson and Colson take cues from secular thrillers too. Robertson goes for cliffhanger chapter endings. Colson makes shrewd use of his White House past, providing insider details of presidential bedroom arrangements, the Attorney General's suite and Secret Service maneuvers...
Because of their devoted audience, and the fact that religious novels have a longer shelf life than secular ones, publishers plan to expand and diversify. The next wave is likely to be adventures and spy thrillers aimed at a big untapped market: men. There is plenty of peril left in the Northwest to provide fodder for those adventure novels. But espionage depends on deception, double dealing and lying. It's hard to see how God will work his way without ruining the plot...