Books Included for This Word Counting

By the 1950s some converts had persuaded themselves that their highbrow evangelizing effort was gaining ever more ground and that a demoralized secularist enemy was on the verge of capitulation, ready to throw itself into the arms of the pope.

Our age, more jaded and skeptical in the face of successive disappointments, can pay it at least backhanded compliments, acknowledge its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and recognize that it provided the standpoint from which to make a telling critique of its secular rivals.

Indeed, as late as 1955, the Oxford English Dictionary, while registering no application whatever of the term to works of secular literature, offers as its only entry relevant to current usage this thoroughly unambiguous definition: "the list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired."The soaring, and searing, poetry of Job, the lovely lyricism of the Song of Songs, were so keenly appreciated by the ancient audience that it was unwilling to have them lost to posterity, for all the theological radicalism of the former and the sensual secularity of the latter.

Even in periods when Jews had no option at all of secular cultural activity, the evidence of what they composed in Hebrew argues that they never ceased to respond to the literary dimension of the Bible, however fervently they saw it in doctrinal or theological terms.

When confronting resistance from a secular or religious spokesmen, some biologists attempt to deflect criticism by conflating scientific methods with scientific goals.

To Haldane as well as to most other biologists, religious objections to tampering with the natural or secular sensibilities that privileged the natural carried no weight.

Palermo was a more Americanized place these days, and freer - women using cell phones, men in blue jeans, even the nuns looked somewhat secular in their dowdy dresses.

It was a liberal, secular, enlightened movement, all three of whose great leaders, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, were philosemites; and it had already freed them.

The Passion of the Christ (that lofty second "the" enforcing Jesus's role as the Messiah) is certainly a distinctively personal movie in a blandly secular Hollywood culture.

The most amazing complaint, championed by the Times and repeated by all the know-nothing secularists on television, is that Gibson insisted on "rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death."

"This country is now in a civil cultural war and the radical, secular, `progressive' left may well destroy our traditional principles and institutions, and notably our education institutions, which is seminal to the rest of the institutions ... "

But it's just the ticket if you're aiming at secular sainthood.

One Massachusetts correspondent, signing himself with the biblical name "Elihu," summed up the secular case by praising the authors of the Constitution as men who "come to us in the plain language of common sense, and propose to our understanding a system of government, as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, nor even a God in a dream to propose any part of it."Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, were nonobservant Jews who died not in the name of religion but because of their secular humanist commitment to racial justice.

Amid strong signals of an early Lok Sabha poll, dissidence on Monday surfaced in the ruling RJD here with a senior member of the state cabinet Ramai Ram criticising the move by the party leadership to persuade Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Ramvilas Paswan to join the secular alliance.

Most Palestinians are too secular to choose a Hamas-led government, Egypt and Jordan fear the consequences for their own regimes and the international community vehemently rejects the option.

More examples in news.google.com [secular]