libyan revolution

What is it about rage that pervades so much thinking about Islam? Start by picking up the latest issues of Time and Newsweek—America’s airport reading—and talking to Google.

Why don’t we hear about nonviolence from the pulpit? There is a complex theology behind the Gospel message of activist, transformative nonviolence that is easy for a homilist to set aside in favor of “God-loves-you!” Sunday messages that demand little from believers beyond robust self-esteem and a vague acceptance of God’s expectation that we generally do right by others. Thus, dusted off during Lent and the Easter season, the premodern language of sin, suffering, sacrifice, and salvation, as Marcus Borg has argued and Pew researchers have tracked, are poorly understood by Christians themselves.

Just as hate responds to hate, those whose political fortunes depend on the manufacture of hatred seem to need each other.

How did a B movie get rendered into Arabic, then used to justify an attack on American sites overseas?

An interview with Mormon Studies expert Patrick Mason.

Claimed writer and director of anti-Islam film that sparked extremist violence in Egypt and Libya.

Violence comes in many forms

To say Muslims are offended by portrayals of Muhammad is missing the point…

In the Muslim world, pluralism collides with democracy and sovereignty, which is far more interesting and alarming than the battle lines we’ve imposed on the Middle East—of secularists versus Islamists, of free-thinking liberals versus religious autocrats.

The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.