Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world. Under the inspiration of Allah, Muham...
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.
Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most eff...
But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.
The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked We don’t know anything and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16
Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as Son of God, lord, and savior and announced the good news (euaggelia)...
They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide.
The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet’s wives, bu...
The word qur’an means recitation. It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was importa...
In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the Kingdom of Ishmael to conquer Palestine.
When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God out there, there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has g...
De vroege christenen geloofden dat het hun voornaamste plicht was om elkaar lief te hebben, maar ze stelden zich niet open voor vreemdelingen. Deze gemeenschap voelde zich aangevallen en klitte samen...
Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, a...
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...
Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of superhumanity. Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary
The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies.
Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.
The Qur’an had begun to develop a primitive just war theory. In the steppes, aggressive warfare was praiseworthy; but in the Qur’an, self-defense was the only possible justification for hostilities an...
The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart, but it...
The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.
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