[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to Go...
Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations,...
Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the Synoptics (Greek for viewed together) because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and m...
The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah...
The Spanish philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–98), better known as Averroës in the West, pushed al-Jabbar’s conception of truth to its limit by proposing a two truths theory of knowledge in wh...
That Jesus—the eternal logos from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and wise men...
So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as that plague. Among the citizenry, the word cross (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to go hang...
Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city, building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his crumbling mud-brick home at nigh...
Perhaps rather than concerning ourselves with trying to form a relationship with God, we should instead become fully aware of the relationship that already exists.
One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: Layla and Majnun. As the crowd watched, Majn...
No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.
Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the s...
Mark’s focus is kept squarely on Jesus’s ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus’s birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus’s resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event.
Mark’s audience was in Rome, where he himself resided. His account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was written mere months after the Jewish Revolt had been crushed
Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.
James’s epistle was probably written by someone from within his inner circle. Again, that is true of almost every book in the New Testament, including the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, as well a...
It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: today I have begotten you (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his first-born son (Exodus 4:22). But in every case...
In short, Islam is not just a faith; Islam is an identity. That is true of all religions. In the United States, polls show that some 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. That d...
In Muhammad’s lifetime, the Quran was never collected in a single volume; in fact, it was never collected at all.
However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the s...