I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.
Far from being the father of jihad, [Prophet] Mohammad was a peacemaker, who risked his life and nearly lost the loyalty of his closest companions because he was determined to effect a reconciliation...
FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultu...
During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could b...
Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of t...
Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.
But his friend and colleague the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905) was a deeper and more measured thinker. He believed that education and not revolution was the answer. Abdu had been devastat...
After the loss of so much of the learning of the past, the destruction of manuscripts and the slaughter of scholars, it was more important to recover what had been lost than to inaugurate more change....
A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.
A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed. In
نفرط في أيامنا هذه، في الحديث عن الله، بيد أن معظم ما نقوله يتسم بالسطحية والتبسيط. نعتقد، في مجتمعنا الديمقراطي، أن مفهوم الرب يجب أن يكون سهلًا، وأن يكون الدين متاحًا للجميع، كثيرًا ما يقول لي القرّ...
So Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism.
People derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power
Man of the Axial Age, Confucius wanted people to become fully conscious of what they were doing. Performance of the li was
If they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because the unexamined life is not worth living.7
Changed the course of history, but the process was not yet complete. It was only when Jesus returned at the Parousia that we shall all be changed and death be swallowed up in victory.64 Then and only...
As the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.24
Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a...
Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own?
When he described the dramatic arrival of the Christ, instead of drawing on the conventional imagery of Jewish apocalypse, he used terminology that was quite new to the Jesus movement, presenting Jesu...