Word: secularized
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...enterprise to a very large degree intertwined with a more general understanding of culture and history. The general education proposal says as much; according to it, the Reason and Faith requirement’s aim “is to help students understand the interplay between religious and secular institutions, practices, and ideas.” We do not believe that religious ideas in particular should be given a platform greater than other social and political forces, and bracketing these ideas as such gives them preeminence incommensurate with their proper place in understanding the modern world. That...
...Muslim world, parts of the Gulf, and Pakistan; a similar covering is known as the burqa in Afghanistan.) I come from a Muslim family and have spent years living in various Muslim communities around the Middle East. Every single Muslim female friend I've had, from pious to secular, veiled to vixen, has been unable to befriend, or even hold a proper conversation with a niqab-wearer. The young son of a close friend, raised in a large Muslim family in a large Muslim country, calls them "ninja ladies." Covering the face, whether in Yorkshire or Beirut, seems to send...
...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...
...other hand, faith-based groups had actually been getting chunks of that money for decades, and the regulations we put in place really didn't tackle the biggest problem facing secular and religious nonprofits. That problem was the general bureaucratic unfriendliness of the Federal Government to small, local organizations--precisely the kind that compassionate conservatives like Bush (and I) thought could do the best job tackling ingrained poverty and hopelessness on the community level. We were supposed to give these small groups their first shot, but without any money, our office was resigned to making mostly symbolic changes...