Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus’s life was the moment when he forgave his executioners,
Men and women have formulated this perception of sacred space in different ways over the centuries, but in their discussion of the special status of a city such as Jerusalem certain themes tend to rec...
Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) founded a school of mystical philosophy at Isfahan, which Majlisi did his best to suppress. They continued the tradition of Suhrawardi, linking...
Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily i...
Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:'When I see the blind and...
Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50
Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.
Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.
Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element.
The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people...
The Taliban’s discrimination against women is completely opposed to the practice of the Prophet and the conduct of the first ummah. The Taliban are typically fundamentalist, however, in their highly s...
The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering...
Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to l...
We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are...
We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village.
We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thi...
We weten niet wie de evangeliën geschreven hebben. Toen ze voor het eerst opdoken circuleerden ze anoniem, en ze werden pas later toegeschreven aan belangrijke figuren uit de jong christelijke kerken....
What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.
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...
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...
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