Secularism

Billy Graham was involved in the Fourth Great Awakening, which mainly took place through the years of 1960 and 1980 (press.uchicago.edu). Some still believe that we are currently living in the Fourth Awakening but, the bulk of the Christian challenging of social norms was solely between those 20 years. Some people have a tough time accepting the ideas of the Fourth Great Awakening as a true “awakening.” This is because the changes and outcomes of the awakening and the actions of the concerning…

Someone is standing in line at a department store, waiting for their turn to pay for their purchases. It is mid-December and the weather is cold and snowy and people are bustling about trying to complete their Christmas shopping. The person who is at the cash register checking the customers out seems to be in the Christmas spirit telling the shoppers to have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year as they finish paying and head toward the front doors to leave. This would usually bring a smile to…

Authoritarianism Disguised as Asian Democracy: The Effect of Single Party Dominance on Malaysia and Singapore’s Political System In our current political landscape, most democracies achieve political legitimacy from a popular belief in an effective government. This relationship between legitimacy and democracy lies in the acknowledgement of key democratic features like representative elections, a multi-party system, citizen rule, limitations on lawmakers, respect for minority rights, etc.…

How are Millennials Different? The Collective Individual Millennials are different. They have been studied repeatedly by statisticians for their differences. Marketing companies have been trying to study them because they are going to overtake the Boomer generation in sheer purchasing power in the next couple of years. Millennials have a few core traits that are generally agreed upon; they are special, sheltered, confident, team oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. “They are also…

Are we at debt with a supreme Being? What is the nature of man’s guilt, given the rupture caused to an original divine order? Can a just God lend forgiveness and thus offer reconciliation to his fallen creation? All these fundamental questions and more have been thoroughly explored by philosophers of all ages. Two thinkers in particular who have sought to provide answers to these inquiries are Friedrich Nietzsche and Saint Anselm. In their respective works, On the Genealogy of Morals and Cur…

There were many other factors that contributed to the Reformation, one being the new humanistic fashion of reading and writing that allowed people to become more insightful and critical. A popular literary humanistic method introduced during the Renaissance was the reading of ancient texts and analyzing them to increase knowledge and insight. Writing became a key way to communicate thoughts and opinions to others. Reading and writing affected the Protestant Reformation greatly because it allowed…

In the long history of English writers and poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot has a huge impact on poetry and stands among Shakespeare and Chaucer as one of the giants of English Literature. . Eliot was a who comes along only once in a generation,and he wrote as if he were living in a bygone era, modeling himself after writers such as Dante and Baudelaire; although he never acknowledged that fact. Throughout Eliot 's works, the author expressed his views on social. He made it clear that the current…

Within humankind, identity shapes different ways of navigating the world one lives in. Factors affecting identity include religion, ethnicity, and political beliefs. These “ways of living,” shaped by identity, will be referred to from here on as “cultures.” Human rights are intended to afford protections to the human population as a whole, but because various cultures have additional vulnerabilities, it is often the case that they require additional protections granted to them. Contrarily, at…

For my selection of critiques I have chosen Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (2007), Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2004), and Reza Aslan’s No God but God (2005). Written in the post September 11th world and published after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, all three of these texts developed in a volatile political world, one that juxtaposed American foreign policy goals with identity politics, as well as a distinct American social milieu, whose sole source of education about the Middle…

fields of art, philosophy, and politics, the creative spirits of men were released during the Renaissance, as humanists pursued many careers, “reaching out for the celestial manna of sound learning”. With the rise of education, individualism, and secularism during the Renaissance, men were able to be “like actors, molding themselves upon the stage of the…