People are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to...
Novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If
Men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government.
Instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
Included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.
In a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the principle of charity; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an interpretation...
Finally ‘Ali, a gawky thirteen year old, could bear it no longer: O prophet of God, he cried, I will be your helper in this matter! Muhammad laid his hand tenderly on the boy’s neck: This is my brothe...
Eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
Dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, s...
Compassion derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning to suffer, undergo, or experience. So compassion means to endure [something] with another person, to put ourselves in somebody e...
Beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain credal p...
All rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews o...
You who reject the faith (kafirun) I do not worship what you worship And you do not worship what I worship I am not a worshipper of what you worship You are not a worshipper of what I worship. A recko...
You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.
You could stamp on this natural shoot of compassion, Mencius argued, just as you can cripple or deform your body, but if you cultivate this altruistic tendency assiduously, it will acquire a dynamic p...
You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. Throughout our live...
Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increa...
Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena:'A presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf...
Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad’s religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their ap...
When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off—an ethic that would become central to Jesus’s moveme...