Word: secularizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Book of Revelation. Since Sept. 11, people from cooler corners of Christianity have begun asking questions about what the Bible has to say about how the world ends, and preachers have answered their questions with sermons they could not have imagined giving a year ago. And even among more secular Americans, there were some who were primed to see an omen in the smoke of the flaming towers--though it had more to do with their beach reading than with their Bible studies...
...Apocalypse, he does not mean to suggest that the world will soon end in a fiery holocaust. "The word apocalypse," he observes, "comes from a Greek word that literally means 'lifting of the veil.' In an apocalyptic age, people feel that the veil of normal, secular reality is lifting, and we can see behind the scenes, see where God and the devil, good and evil are fighting to control the future." To the extent that more people in the U.S. and around the world believe history is accelerating, that ancient prophecies are being fulfilled in real time, "it changes...
...popularized way, it's all going to pan out in the end," he says. "It assures them, in the midst of a general cultural breakdown and a time of growing danger, that God is going to redeem the time." Evangelicals who had felt somehow left behind in secular terms, by a coarse culture and a fear of general moral decay, welcome arguments that even the most tragic events may be evidence of God's larger plan. In fact, you don't have to be religious to be hoping for that as well...
Notions of a divinely choreographed end to history are almost as old as Western faith. They appear first in the Jewish Bible's books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The books were edited in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., and secular scholars find an intimate connection between their content and the horrors Jews faced at the time. In 586 B.C., after a brutal siege, the kingdom of Babylon conquered Israel and forced its elite into exile. The prophets defiantly proclaimed the opposite: the establishment over all nations of a Jewish kingdom under a divinely anointed Messiah...
...Alike" [ESSAY, June 10]. Elliott agrees with the assertion of Rohan Gunaratna, author of a scholarly study on al-Qaeda, that Osama bin Laden "never interpreted Islam to assist a given political goal. Islam is his political goal." This idea implies that bin Laden's attempts to undermine secular governments and establish Islamic religious law are not political in nature. While his stated goals include the ouster of U.S. troops from Arab soil and the destruction of Israel, bin Laden uses terrorist means to push his political agenda into areas where people have been disenfranchised by the failure of Islamic...