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A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or 'duende'. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no ~ Ben Okri
A Secular Sermon quotes by Ben Okri
January 20, 2009, was also the first time a newly elected president used the occasion sometimes called a secular sermon to the nation to give voice to the diversity of religious life among its people. "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims," Obama said, "Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. ~ Peter Manseau
A Secular Sermon quotes by Peter Manseau
We began before words, and we will end beyond them.
It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said 'and' meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words.

If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative – then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people's lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university.

We seem to think that words aren't things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words – which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty.

We are all wounded inside one way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest dist ~ Ben Okri
A Secular Sermon quotes by Ben Okri
The greatest inspiration, the most sublime ideas of living that have come down to humanity come from a higher realm, a happier realm, a place of pure dreams, a heaven of blessed notions. Ideas and infinite possibilities dwell there in absolute tranquility.
Before these ideas came to us they were pure, they were silent, and their life-giving possibilities were splendid. But when they come to our earthly realm they acquire weight and words. They become less.
The sweetest notions, ideas of universal love and justice, love for one another, or intuitions of joyful creation, these are all perfect in their heavenly existences. Any artist will tell you that ideas are happier in the heaven of their conception than on the earth of their realization. We should return to pure contemplation, to sweet meditation, to the peace of silent loving, the serenity of deep faith, to the stillness of deep waters. We should sit still in our deep selves and dream good new things for humanity. We should try and make those dreams real. We should keep trying to raise higher the conditions and possibilities of this world. Then maybe one day, after much striving, we might well begin to create a world justice and a new light on this earth that could inspire a ten-second silence of wonder – even in heaven. ~ Ben Okri
A Secular Sermon quotes by Ben Okri
You want to have two guys making out in front of your 4-year-old? It's OK with them. A guy smoking a joint, blowing the smoke into your little kid's face? OK with them. And I'm not exaggerating here. This is exactly what the secular movement stands for. ~ Bill O'Reilly
A Secular Sermon quotes by Bill O'Reilly
A democracy is not truly democratic unless it's secular. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto
A Secular Sermon quotes by Shawn Lawrence Otto
A man's character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate. ~ Paul Eldridge
A Secular Sermon quotes by Paul Eldridge
For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love. ~ Andre Dubus
A Secular Sermon quotes by Andre Dubus
When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home. ~ Jane Swisshelm
A Secular Sermon quotes by Jane Swisshelm
Musk has talked about having more kids, and it's on this subject that he delivers some controversial philosophizing vis-à-vis the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. "There's this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers," Musk said. "Like, if it's a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that's not a good thing. It should be at least neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad, too. I mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter is that basically the wealthier - basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I'm not saying like only smart people should have kids. I'm just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain - at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You're like, 'Wow, that's probably not good. ~ Ashlee Vance
A Secular Sermon quotes by Ashlee Vance
A great irony is that the quest for secular immortality is being funded by foundations and individuals who seem to hate life ~ Dean Cavanagh
A Secular Sermon quotes by Dean Cavanagh
Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mistery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalismo hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come. ~ Robert A. Nisbet
A Secular Sermon quotes by Robert A. Nisbet
If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow. ~ Jon Meacham
A Secular Sermon quotes by Jon Meacham
Those who regard worldly affairs as a hindrance to buddha dharma think only that there is no buddha dharma in the secular world; they do not understand that there is no secular world in buddha dharma. ~ Dogen
A Secular Sermon quotes by Dogen
How do we break free from the dichotomies that limit God's power in our lives? How can love and service to God become living sparks that light up our whole lives? By discovering a worldview perspective that unifies *both* secular and sacred, public and private, within a single framework. By understanding that all honest work and creative enterprise can be a valid calling from the Lord. And by realizing that there are biblical principles that apply to every field of work. These insights will fill us with purpose, and we will begin to experience the joy that comes from relating to God in and through every dimension of our lives. ~ Nancy Pearcey
A Secular Sermon quotes by Nancy Pearcey
Secular entertaining is a terrible bondage. Its source is human pride. Demanding perfection, fostering the urge to impress, it is a rigorous taskmaster which enslaves. In contrast, Scriptural hospitality is a freedom which liberates. ~ Karen Burton Mains
A Secular Sermon quotes by Karen Burton Mains
We're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil. ~ Tim LaHaye
A Secular Sermon quotes by Tim LaHaye
I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame. ~ Stanley Hauerwas
A Secular Sermon quotes by Stanley Hauerwas
Despite the fact that Christianity initially was a non-violent radical movement of God's people, many today who claim to be of Christ seem to see war as needed and even God ordained. Such blasphemy is hardly new. Since the days of Constantine (I) when the State and the Church made an unholy alliance, the deception of redemptive warfare has been clung to as if it were a life belt. Yet, ever since the time of Jesus the Messiah and prophets before Him many radicals (often persecuted and outcast) have questioned the morality of war. Now in the 21st Century generations are also rising up against the war machine among both the secular and spiritual sector of society. They recognise that war is for power, economy and pride, not justice or peace. Long may the voices in the wilderness be heard, as they prepare the way for the Lord, who when he comes again will be the undoing of evil and the establisher of a kingdom not of this world that will live in peace forever!!! ~ David Holdsworth
A Secular Sermon quotes by David Holdsworth
I t was a well-known fact among Christian homeschoolers that public
schools were bastions of gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, rap music, pop culture, secular humanism, witchcraft, and body piercings. ~ Josh Sundquist
A Secular Sermon quotes by Josh Sundquist
A biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism. ~ Nancy Pearcey
A Secular Sermon quotes by Nancy Pearcey
Ironically, even as Khomeini empowered some women, he also found ways of oppressing their entire gender. The regime replaced the shah's secular law with an Islamic law, which allowed men to marry up to four wives, to divorce them whenever the husbands wished, and to retain custody of children. The law put the value of a woman's life at half of that of a man's life, and the value of her testimony at half that of a man's testimony.
Thus women in Iran became watchdogs and scapegoats, both the foot soldiers of the new regime and its victims. Newly empowered, they were also newly oppressed. Theirs was a paradoxical plight - and at the time, no one could have foreseen how it would one day make women a force of enormous change in Iran. ~ Nazila Fathi
A Secular Sermon quotes by Nazila Fathi
I want to, first of all, remove a very major error that exists in the study of Rumi today not only in America but also among a lot of Persians, Turks and others who consider Rumi only as a kind of nationalistic emblem. Rumi was a Muslim, he was a Muslim poet. He never missed his prayers. He said, (عَقل قربان کُن بہ پیش مصطفیٰ) "Sacrifice your intellect at the feet of the Prophet." Masnavi is a commentary to the Qur'an. He knew the Qur'an extremely well. At the beginning of the Masvani, he says this remarkable sentence, (این کتاب اصول اصول اصول دین) "The book is the principle of the principle of the principle of religion [in respect of its unveiling the mysteries of attainment to the Truth and of certainty]." So it is very very clear that this book is dealing with the heart of the religion. There is no secular Rumi which is authentic. Rumi cannot be secularized … In order to understand Rumi you have to understand that he was not a New Age Poet. He was not born in California. He does not represent what [some of us] are looking for; a kind of bland, sentimental, universality in which you do not do anything for God, you don't have to reform yourself, you just get together and be happy. He is not that kind of a poet, you must understand that. The relation of Rumi with Islam once severed will make Rumi irrelevant as a spiritual therapist … Anyway, it is very very important to realize that all the message of Rumi, everything he wrote is just in order for us to remember God.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr
A Secular Sermon quotes by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The rote nature of education in contemporary Muslim societies can be traced to attitudes inherited from traditional education, wherein knowledge is something to be acquired rather than discovered. and in which the attitude of mind is passive and receptive rather than creative and inquisitive. The social conditioning of an authoritarian traditional environment has. as an inescapable consequence. That all knowledge comes to be viewed as unchangeable and all books tend to be memorized or venerated to some degree. The concept of secular knowledge as a problem-solving tool which evolves over time is alien to traditional thought. ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy
A Secular Sermon quotes by Pervez Hoodbhoy
the art of living is to be found in doing things well: every single action, every single day. In a dualistic world - one of polarities, perceived by our ego as one of separateness, filled with objects and subjects - it means using everything we have, secular and spiritual, to do things well. In this way, we create a life that manifests the divine, creates beauty, and does not seek achievement as its purpose. This requires full attention to everything we do: not making things "right" or perfect, but making them consciously, based in the authentic being we are ~ Claude Poncelet
A Secular Sermon quotes by Claude Poncelet
We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking - what we might call "magical reason" - pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor. ~ David Watson
A Secular Sermon quotes by David Watson
A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect. ~ James A. Haught
A Secular Sermon quotes by James A. Haught
The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition - that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable - is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute - the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures - is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature. ~ Theodore Dalrymple
A Secular Sermon quotes by Theodore Dalrymple
There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us. ~ Newt Gingrich
A Secular Sermon quotes by Newt Gingrich
Your challenge, then, is to create a religion of your own by being secular in a religious way, or religious in a secular way. You can learn how to see the secular from a religious angle, and vice versa. ~ Thomas Moore
A Secular Sermon quotes by Thomas Moore
When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of weekend dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens. ~ Pope John Paul II
A Secular Sermon quotes by Pope John Paul II
When I was a kid, we weren't really supposed to listen to secular music. But one day, I found a 'Led Zeppelin IV' cassette tape in the garage, and it was just amazing-sounding music, not like anything I'd heard before. I remember thinking: 'Well, if God created music, why is his music in church not as good as this?' ~ Nathaniel Rateliff
A Secular Sermon quotes by Nathaniel Rateliff
Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for all Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled. British Protestants in Ireland once imposed a stiff fine on anyone who did not attend church and deputies forcibly dragged Catholics into Protestant churches. Priests in the American West sometimes chained Indians to church pews to enforce church attendance. After many such episodes in Christendom it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Much of the current hostility against Christians evokes the memory of such examples. The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today. ~ Philip Yancey
A Secular Sermon quotes by Philip Yancey
Christians tend simply to align themselves with secular and idolatrous ideologies, and they do this without integrating fully into their thinking the ways in which kingdom priorities ought to arrange a Christian's perspective on the society by holding love, human dignity, and solidarity in healthy tension.

Anthony Bradley in Morgan, Christopher W.; Peterson, Robert A. (2012-11-30). The Kingdom of God (Theology in Community) (Kindle Locations 4636-4638). Crossway. Kindle Edition. ~ Anthony Bradley
A Secular Sermon quotes by Anthony Bradley
In Britain, we are not a secular state as France is, or some other countries. ~ Gordon Brown
A Secular Sermon quotes by Gordon Brown
The gay marriage thing to me, I don't understand why it's so important for the secular progressives in this country, the people who want to change America fundamentally and every way, why this is the lead issue. The L.A. Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe. These people are going, 'Oh, my God, what are you doing? How can you not see the civil rights aspect of this?' ~ Bill O'Reilly
A Secular Sermon quotes by Bill O'Reilly
Can a secular artist be used as a vessel to bring souls to Christ? Of course ... this is God we are talking about! ~ Monica Johnson
A Secular Sermon quotes by Monica Johnson
It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government. ~ Roy Moore
A Secular Sermon quotes by Roy Moore
when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into the property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life. ~ Hermann Broch
A Secular Sermon quotes by Hermann Broch
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel. ~ Robert Hughes
A Secular Sermon quotes by Robert Hughes
If I had hoped to skirt the sense of being a stranger in the world by coming to Ghana, then disappointment awaited me. And I had suspected as much before I arrived. Being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging, and exclusion but as well involves a particular relation to the past. If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most preferred not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. .I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead. ~ Saidiya Hartman
A Secular Sermon quotes by Saidiya Hartman
A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person ~ Neal Stephenson
A Secular Sermon quotes by Neal Stephenson
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. ~ Noah Feldman
A Secular Sermon quotes by Noah Feldman
Growing up we were secular Jews, but what I got out of Judaism at that time in my life was questions. Everything was a question. "Dad, is there a heaven? Is there a hell?" You never could get an answer. That informed a lot of my reasons for getting into Scientology, because they had all the answers. They said I was not my body, not my mind. I don't have a soul; I am an immortal soul. I've lived many lives and I'll live endlessly into the future, and as an immortal soul I have no gender. ~ Kate Bornstein
A Secular Sermon quotes by Kate Bornstein
I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we? ~ Terry Tempest Williams
A Secular Sermon quotes by Terry Tempest Williams
If we remember what we have been called to and devote ourselves to praying for what is best, we may care a little less about the opinions of a secular world and devote ourselves more scrupulously to serving the only Master whose opinion matters. ~ D. A. Carson
A Secular Sermon quotes by D. A. Carson
Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health. ~ Os Guinness
A Secular Sermon quotes by Os Guinness
Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him. ~ Clifford Geertz
A Secular Sermon quotes by Clifford Geertz
In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence. ~ James MacDonald
A Secular Sermon quotes by James MacDonald
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