Word: seculars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Among the top 200 are nearly three dozen companies that sell products and services to the sick and dying, from Gilead Sciences, a biotechnology outfit, to Quest Diagnostics, which administers blood and other laboratory tests, to Ventas, a real estate investment trust that manages hospitals and nursing homes. Another secular trend: more Americans seeking out higher education. Among the beneficiaries are for-profit institutions such as Apollo Group, ITT Educational Services and Strayer Education...
...they were all dreading Christmas. "None of us like Christmas," he says, adding, "That's sort of bad if you're a pastor." Instead of helping their congregations focus on the season of Advent and prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, the pastors found themselves competing with a secular consumerism that made December the hardest time to make their message heard...
...foot soldiers in the war on Christmas is "Jesus is the reason for the season." Often, however, it seems that being able to score a half-price Nintendo DSi and a "Merry Christmas" from the checkout clerk is the real prize. The Religious Right has spent decades casting secular culture as the enemy. And yet instead of critiquing the values of the consumer marketplace, many conservative Christians have embraced it as the battleground they seek to reclaim...
...movement like Advent Conspiracy is countercultural on two fronts - fighting the secular idea that Christmas is a monthlong shopping and decorating ritual and also the powerful conservative notion that the holiday requires acknowledgement from the nation's retailers to be truly meaningful. It's not easy, says a youth pastor whose church supports Advent Conspiracy. "When you start jacking with people's idea of what Christmas is and you start to go against this $450 billion machine of materialism and consumerism, it really messes with people," he explains. "It takes a lot of patience to say there's a different...
...tells TIME. "During heated periods, we hear shots fired three, four times per week," Gilinski says. "Out of groups of maybe 10, only one or two get through the border. The others are shot at or surrender and return to Egypt." (See TIME's video "Jerusalem's New Secular Mayor...