Word: secularizing
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...State girl with a penchant for Bible studies and heavy makeup. I was an East Coast public school kid with secular parents and a socialist bent. Aside from my father, who registered with the G.O.P. every year “to vote against the crazies [read: the religious right],” I’d never met a real Republican before, not to mention a member of the religious right. These people existed for me mainly in legend, caricatured to the point that, had Barrett pasted a Swastika on her wall next to her Degas posters, I wouldn?...
...been largely marginalized by the central government's conciliatory approach. Bangkok pumped development funds into the south, started governing through local leaders, including Muslims, and pardoned a host of insurgents. Relative calm returned, until this year. Now, say experts, what used to be a nationalist agenda pursued by essentially secular groups has been hijacked by Islamic radicalism. "In the post-9/11 world, there is no such thing anymore as a local Muslim struggle," says Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror and who is assembling a database on extremist Islamic groups in Southeast...
...also not terribly enthused—though I am rather amused—by the implications of that truism. What it means is that the more religious among us are likely to be in officially-condoned sexual relationships at an earlier age than the secular. Maybe it’s just my own frustration speaking here, but isn’t there something…wrong with that? If one of the driving forces behind the postponement of sex until marriage is that sex is risky, powerful and potentially sacred territory, then in some ways it makes more sense...
...irony is that religious/sexual conservatives get to be in condoned sexual relationships years before more secular and modern religious types. What a bizarre axis of further division. In fact, celebrated and sanctioned sexuality might be one department in which biological determinism has something going for it: The existence of religious young people’s physical desires might be swept under the rug but the wedding plans dance highly visibly atop. At the same time, the less traditionally religious folks among us can choose to either ignore their hormones or take the so-called “ungodly?...
...leaders in Australia's history have been bold enough to orchestrate a sharp turn in school funding policy. In 1880, when less than a third of New South Wales children received schooling, the state's premier, Henry Parkes, pushed through the Public Instruction Act, establishing free, secular and compulsory education. Grand stuff; but by simultaneously withdrawing all aid from denominational schools, Parkes caused almost a century of community division...