Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates...
The sacred reality is not simply transcendent, out there, but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect.
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.
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
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.
Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the...
Het hoofdthema [van het verhaal van Kaïn En Abel] is het gevecht tussen eigenliefde en de liefde voor God. 'Kaïn' betekende 'bezit'. Kaïn wilde alles voor zichzelf houden en streefde enkel zijn eigenb...
Het was absurd, stelde Filo, om het eerste hoofdstuk van Genesis letterlijk op te vatten en te denken dat de wereld in zes dagen was geschapen. Het getal 'zes' was een symbool voor volmaaktheid.
If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt.
In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. T...
In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was experienced in mysterious physical phenomena. The Rabbis spoke about the Holy Spirit, which had brooded over creation and the building of the sanct...
It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim...
Mecca became a station for these northbound caravans. It was conveniently located in the center of the Hijaz, and even though it was built on solid rock, which made agriculture impossible there, settl...
Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often-though again, not always-segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianit...
Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territ...
One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call fundamentalism in most of the major world religions, including the three...
Paul had been doing his best to hasten the coming of the Messiah; that was the good that he was trying to do. But in an overwhelming moment of truth, he realized that Jesus’s followers were absolutely...
Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and wa...
THE PROPHET (570-632) During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E., an Arab business-man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to reti...
The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Chri...
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