The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to...
The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: Why are there being...
The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the...
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, something met which bars my passage and is before me in its entirety, and a mystery, something in which I find myself...
Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.
Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.
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)...
Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.
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...
Marriages conducted in absentia to seal an alliance were often contracted at this time between adults and minors who were even younger than ‘A’isha. This practice continued in Europe
Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim.
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.
In the Palaeolithic period, human beings had felt a disturbing kinship with the animals that they hunted and killed. They expressed their inchoate distress in the rituals of sacrifice, which honoured...
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began...
But there were ulama who refused to accept the closing of the gates of ijtihad. Throughout Islamic history, at times of great political crisis—especially during a period of foreign encroachment—a refo...
But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.
But Enki wants to save Atrahasis,50 the ‘exceedingly wise man’ of the city of Shuruppak.
Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an i...
After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think,...
Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.