Word: secularism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strangely, if you take a step out of his office, you can find a woman selling Taoist trinkets. A hundred steps away is a small Beijing park that is packed most mornings with dozens of Chinese practicing the slo-mo robotics of Tai Chi, which while secular is deeply Taoist. A mile away is a Protestant church that draws 3,000 souls to its weekend services. Within a hundred miles are scores of monasteries, seminaries and altars. Despite 50 years of the most violent scrubbing, religion still coats China with an ancient varnish. And as the nation's core ideology...
...explanation that allows the bereaved a certainty and solace in the face of a horrible riddle. And faced with the same endless series of senseless bloodlettings, even more secular precincts of America have been giving such claims a respectful hearing. After the shootings a moist-eyed George W. Bush said, "There seems to be a wave of evil passing through America." Today show's Katie Couric, interviewing Wedgwood's pastor, Al Meredith, listened as he offered the standard explanation for the crime: the killer was "deranged and deluded." Then, almost hesitantly, the pastor noted, "There's some possible theological, religious...
...scientific breakthrough has proved unambiguously benign--unleashing the atom, for example--but all have expanded the human horizon into spheres prior generations could not even imagine. In the process, the growing ability to master the universe has opened a new window into the human soul. Science and metaphysics, the secular and the sacred, have begun to merge. As science comes face to face with infinity--as it is forced to do by Einstein's theories--it deals with a phenomenon it can barely describe and has yet proved unable to explain...
Bush's proposal represents a shift in the provision of social services rather than an expansion. If funding for religious charities were increased, given the current budget climate, it is unreasonable to think that funding for the government's social programs--Bush's "secular alternatives"--would not decline. While some would rejoice in seeing motivated individuals supplant a government bureaucracy, this is not always good public policy...
...religious one. Bush was quick to deal with the prospect of a mixing of church and state, adding that under his proposal the government would not discriminate "for or against Methodists or Mormons or Muslims, or good people with no faith at all," and said there would always be "secular alternatives" to religious programs...