It is this egalitarian spirit that Wills accuses the priesthood of betraying, establishing a "monopoly on the sacred" that has made it difficult for Catholics to believe unholy things of their holy men.
The 20th-century British scholar of religion Ninian Smart developed a phenomenological model that featured a more dynamic vision of the sacred that could explain the diversity among religions, much of which it attributed to historical and cultural differences.
Writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1993 ("Life Is Sacred: That's the Easy Part") Ronald Dworkin put this very succinctly: "We almost all accept … that human life in all its forms is sacred that it has intrinsic and objective value quite apart from any value it might have to the person whose life it is.
He points to the prudence exhibited by Oregonians, with only 238 people using prescribed drugs to end their lives (though for those who regard life as sacred that is still 238 too many).For those who use Oregon's law and their survivors such as Frederick Miller's widow, Nora the Death with Dignity Act simply makes sense.
"Vice President Al Gore is the type of politician where nothing is sacred, that will say and do anything to preserve their own political future, even if that means using fear and deceptive means," Mr. Watts was to say, according to an advance text of his speech.
The notion of a not-being signals two things: (i) technological revealing drives out any sense of awe and wonder in the presence of beings, obliterating the secularized sense of what is sacred that is exemplified by the poetic habitation of the natural environment of the Rhine; (ii) we are essentially indifferent to the loss.
Hick's approach might also seem to be in trouble for more straightforwardly religious reasons: as he notes, most believers privilege the picture of the sacred that is favoured in their own tradition (rather than thinking of that picture as simply another way of representing an appearance of the Real).
A satire of the sacred that is totally without censure.
How open they are, how trusting and how sacred that trust is.
In what do you hold as sacred?" that music (hip hop often cited) provides what churches often can't afford to.
But there are also our personal prayers, our way of being with the sacred that is our deepest nature and that of the world around us.
