Word: secularizing
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...speech last week to the White House Faith-Based and Community-Based Initiatives Leadership Conference, the President tried to evade this objection by lumping together his support of religiously affiliated and secular community initiatives. But community-based initiatives have none of the inherent problems of faith-based initiatives and should receive full government support. They are not connected in any way to religious organizations, their methods and ideology are purely secular, and their hiring practices are nondiscriminatory. Faith-based initiatives are another story...
Bush claims that the people that these organizations seek to help—recovering drug addicts, alcoholics, and the poor, among others—are free to choose between religiously affiliated or secular programs. But often, these people will enroll in the most vocal or the best financed organizations. It is hard to imagine a homeless person who is offered help by a group refusing it just because of the group’s religious affiliation. Other times, those most in need of help by these charitable groups have no choice at all. For example, the only vocational training available...
...Although secular, nothing in Tomorrows is likely to offend Kingsbury's regular readers. The story of a male bull rider and a female rodeo rider bears the hallmarks of all Kingsbury's narratives: sympathetic characters facing overwhelming obstacles. "When I first wrote it, [Center Street] called and said, 'We need 80% of the Christian content to come out of it,'" recalls Kingsbury. "Because it's about love, I was O.K. with that. It's really about love that doesn't fail, and that's a I Corinthians 13 message." A message that can be embraced by devotees of the Bible...
...Right now, the most significant opposition to the regimes of Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia comes not from secular Western-oriented democrats, but from Islamists, radical and moderate. Egypt may be a pro-U.S. regime at peace with Israel; Syria has a more troubled relationship with Washington, cooperating against al-Qaeda, but less so in Iraq, while openly defying the Bush Administration on Lebanon and technically still at war with Israel, which occupies Syrian territory on the Golan Heights. But if truly democratic elections were held in both places today, the smart money would be on the Muslim...
There's little dispute that the results of the Jan. 30 election have given Kurdish nationalism fresh momentum. Although they are predominantly Muslim, the Kurds of Iraq have long favored a more secular form of government than most Shi'ites do. The Kurdistan Referendum Movement, a grass-roots organization of intellectuals and junior political officials, says that of the 2 million who took part in an informal Election Day referendum on independence, 99% voted in favor. Kurds control their peshmerga militia soldiers and their own borders and are determined to preserve their sanctuary. Officially, Kurdistan exists only north...