Word: secularize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology. I am suggesting that perhaps if we progressives shed some of our own biases, we might recognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We need to take faith seriously not simply to block the religious right but to engage all persons of faith in the larger project of American renewal...
...build on these still tentative partnerships between the religious and secular worlds, more work will need to be done. The first and most difficult step for some evangelical Christians is to acknowledge the critical role that the establishment clause has played not only in the development of our democracy but also in the robustness of our religious practice. Not only has America avoided the sorts of religious strife that plague the globe, but religious institutions have continued to thrive - a phenomenon that some observers attribute directly to the absence of a state-sponsored church...
...those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular and material worlds over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth...
...June 2003, and I was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The office had opened in the West Wing in 2001 to support the President's campaign promise of $8 billion a year in new funding for both religious and secular charities that helped the poor. That money never materialized, however, and I was increasingly stuck with the task of explaining to religious groups why the White House was so bad at helping them do good. This meeting, with a group of prominent African-American pastors who had supported Bush's plan, promised...
...them promulgated under seemingly faith-phobic Democratic Administrations, that discriminated against faith-based groups simply because they might have a religious-sounding name. The Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, for instance, was once denied the chance to apply for a federal grant even though it was an entirely secular organization...