Word: secularize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hollywood is aggressively secular and materialistic, and it does stereotype Christians (and Muslims, single women, gay men, fat kids and, for that matter, Hollywood celebrities). But it also needs Christianity, maybe more than Christianity needs it. No one thanks Carl Sagan at an Oscar podium. The rich imagery and mystery of Catholicism made The Da Vinci Code (and its burgeoning knockoffs) possible. And while Christmas movies and TV shows may not involve many mangers, they quietly--and profitably--ratify Christianity as the default U.S. religion, as any Jew or Hindu can attest in December...
Damascus may not have that card for long. Internally, the refugee issue poses long-term dilemmas for the Baathist regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The presence of so many needy Iraqis has exposed the government's failure to make economic reforms. The Syrian government--dominated by a secular core of Alawite Muslims who rule a country that is 74% Sunni Muslim--may have to stop the influx as a measure of self-preservation. Assad is particularly concerned about extremists re-entering the country from Iraq, according to Syrian security analysts. "We used to call them the Afghan Arabs...
...political infighting could yet scuttle the deal once it goes to a vote in parliament, perhaps in early March, say the law's detractors. "The feeling is that the law is focused very much on sectarianism," says Saleh al-Mutlaq, who heads the National Dialogue Front, a small secular party with 11 seats in parliament. "It divides the country and the wealth into groups - Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites," he said on the phone from Amman on Tuesday...
...Dallas Seminary, whom the Discovery Channel had vet the film two weeks ago, adds another objection: why would Jesus's family or followers bury his bones in a family plot and "then turn around and preach that he had been physically raised from the dead?" If that objection smacks secular readers as relying too heavily on scripture, then Bock's larger point is still trenchant: "I told them that there were too many assumptions being claimed as discoveries, and that they were trying to connect dots that didn't belong together...
...matches would have been unlikely in the Iran of my parents' generation, where social classes were impermeable, people mostly married within their religious and financial caste, and hejab was an inherited, fixed custom within specific groups. Back then, the daughters of veiled women learned to veil, the daughters of secular women learned to go bare-headed, and both were taught to regard the other, respectively, as backward or immoral. Such attitudes, as you might imagine, were not conducive to peaceful coexistence in a country that is composed of religious traditionalists, Westernized secularists, and everything in between. That these days...