If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one st...
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...
Human sacrifice was common in the pagan world. It was cruel but had a logic and rationale. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of...
Everything that goes up must come down: that is a law of life, so to strengthen your enemy by yielding to him would actually hasten his decline. The
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...
Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of...
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...
Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. The
Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as Augustus, and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne’s feet.
But aggression, righteous condemnation, and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack.
At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion. I
As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and...
And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind.
All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who...
All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity,
After Iyman Faris’s foiled plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents.85 But just as...
A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to percei...
A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth. If
A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party.
We may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We