Definition of Secular

Secular

Coming or observed once in an age or a century.

Pertaining to an age, or the progress of ages, or to a long period of time; accomplished in a long progress of time; as, secular inequality; the secular refrigeration of the globe.

Of or pertaining to this present world, or to things not spiritual or holy; relating to temporal as distinguished from eternal interests; not immediately or primarily respecting the soul, but the body; worldly.

Not regular; not bound by monastic vows or rules; not confined to a monastery, or subject to the rules of a religious community; as, a secular priest.

Belonging to the laity; lay; not clerical.

A secular ecclesiastic, or one not bound by monastic rules.

A church official whose functions are confined to the vocal department of the choir.

A layman, as distinguished from a clergyman.

Related Definitions:

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Secular Quotations

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way.
Newt Gingrich

Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
Chaim Potok

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
Thomas Aquinas

The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
Hannah Arendt

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
Joseph Addison

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
Henry Van Dyke

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
Robert Hughes

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
Lionel Blue

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Angela Carter

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
M. H. Abrams

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.
Karen Armstrong

Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.
Peter L. Berger

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism.
Peter L. Berger

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

More people need to understand the games secular liberals play. Here's one rule-of-thumb: No matter how bad a story sounds - particularly if it sounds bad - recognize the pattern of defamation.
Marvin Olasky

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.
Ulrich Beck

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

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

All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History.
Tim LaHaye

'The Purpose-Driven Life' is not just a mega-bestselling work of Christian faith; it is the thing that every voter, secular or not, yearns for.
Eric Liu

It was, however, in the interest of Osama bin Laden for us to destroy a secular Arab leader; it was very much in the interest of the Iranians because they wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein for Iraq's invasion in 1980.
William Odom

From my point of view, there is a tremendous amount to be said for secular humanism.
Vidal Sassoon

In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.
Richard Cobden

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
David Antin

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.
Jurgen Habermas

The Southern Baptist Church is a specific culture in itself. So, I had to study, talk to people, watch tape and go to performances to see how Gospel artists move compared to secular artists.
Boris Kodjoe

More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right.
Jack Schwartz

More Secular Quotations

Secular Translations

secular in Spanish is secular

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