When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with t...
What Tibetan Buddhists call the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow, so that we feel it almost as intensely as we feel our own. We
The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet’s life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to s...
The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and...
The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed ove...
The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.
The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to und...
The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The
The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies.
Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.
Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order.
In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant ways.
Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.
Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a v...
Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain characteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. The...
Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.84 They certainly fo...
Elle Wiesel, premio Nobel, había vivido sólo para Dios durante su infancia en Hungría; su vida había estado configurada por el Talmud y esperaba ser iniciado un día en los misterios de la cábala. Cuan...
Compassion dervies 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 el...
Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position,...
The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.