All 4 Uses
secular
in
Change of Heart, by Picoult
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- To be honest, I had split religion along the seam of secular and nonsecular; choosing to concentrate on the beauty of a Caravaggio without noticing the Madonna and child; or finding the best lamb recipe for a lavish Easter dinner, without thinking about the Passion.†
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- To be honest, I had split religion along the seam of secular and nonsecular; choosing to concentrate on the beauty of a Caravaggio without noticing the Madonna and child; or finding the best lamb recipe for a lavish Easter dinner, without thinking about the Passion.†
nonsecular = religiousstandard prefix: The prefix "non-" in nonsecular means not and reverses the meaning of secular. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
- Shay Bourne is not a Muslim, or a Wiccan; he's not a secular humanist or a member of the Baha'i faith.†
- And his words have been used by the Supreme Court many times—in fact, the Lemon test, which the high court has used since 1971, says that for a law to be constitutional, it must have a secular purpose, must neither advance nor inhibit religion, and must not result in excessive government entanglement with religion.†
Definitions:
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(1)
(secular as in: a secular organization) not religious
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, secular means not a member of the clergy or not belonging to a specific religious order.
Also rarely, secular can reference long time spans in various senses such as:- a one-time rather than a cyclical event -- such as "a secular decrease in real estate prices" or "a secular rather than a periodic planetary perturbation"
- a once-in-an-age or once per century event -- such as "The Secular Games of Rome"
In physics, secular equilibrium refers to a state where a radioactive isotope decays at the same rate at which it is produced.