Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of the...
Moses explained, the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries am...
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...
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...
Many found the very idea hilarious. Hi, Karen—how’s God? they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance.
Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
It is simply not true that religion is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and cre...
It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark’s.
In the Quranic vision there is no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the political, sexuality and worship. The whole of life was potentially holy and had to be brought int...
In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker share the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your be...
In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects...
Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been r...
Het was niet het opzet van de eerste christenen om zich van het jodendom af te scheiden. De enige Jezus die we echt kennen, de Jezus is die wordt beschreven in het Nieuwe Testament, dat niet als objec...
Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of ‘Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhamm...
Descartes’s argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm’s Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed. Yet we could not arrive at the idea of imperfe...
De profeet Jeremia [...] had zo zijn bedenkingen tegen een geschreven wet: de 'pen van de schrijvers' kon de traditie door een simpele schrijffout vervalsen en een geschreven tekst kon een oppervlakki...
Christian spirituality had been strongly influenced by Platonism, which sought to liberate the soul from the body, but in some circles in the early fourth century, people were beginning to hope that t...
Charity, Davidson continues, is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.13
As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain.
A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.