I grew up in northern Italy, in a Catholic household. For us, as for many Italian families, being Catholic was a matter of tradition rather than of faith. When I was young, I attended catechism in Milan, received my sacraments, and believed in God. But my parents did not teach me to practice a . . . . Continue Reading »
Immigration Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, which was lately set forth in Matthew Schmitz’s “Immigration Idealism” (May), famously relegates Jesus’s social teaching to the realm of the ideal rather than the possible. Schmitz’s endorsement of this realism makes a mistake that . . . . Continue Reading »
The separation of Christians and Muslims in Cyprus points to the destructive potential of ideology. Continue Reading »
Immense practical obstacles stand in the way of making the liberal principles of the Universal Declaration truly universal. Continue Reading »
The Catholic Church in the West is full of corruption—financial, sexual, and spiritual. We are forced to face this hard reality, not the least because the weak pontificate of Pope Francis offers so little of substance. The corruption that afflicts us does not arise from overpowering lusts. Our . . . . Continue Reading »
Growing up in twenty-first-century Britain, I was often struck by a feeling of anomie. Around the time I was born, John Major tried to evoke a vanished past by conjuring “long shadows on county grounds” and “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.” As for my . . . . Continue Reading »
God in the Qur’an by jack miles knopf, 256 pages, $26.95 Jack Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian turned author and editor, is best known for God: A Biography. In his latest book, he compares the gods of the Qur’an and Bible, with sympathy for the former. Instead of addressing the . . . . Continue Reading »
Muslim Progressives Paul Rowan Brian (“Muslims in American Politics,” November) has deftly laid bare the source of Muslims’ predicament in the United States: their profound anxiety over being accepted as “real” Americans, and the tendency of this anxiety to overcome their confidence in the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Qurʾān and the Bible: Text and Commentary by gabriel said reynolds yale, 1032 pages, $40 This book is misleadingly named. The blame, if blame there be, rests with the stingy conventions of contemporary publishing. The work deserves one of those splendidly prolix seventeenth-century . . . . Continue Reading »
In the summer of 2017, something unusual happened at the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) annual conference in Chicago. A table set up by Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV) in partnership with Human Rights Campaign (HRC) was removed after an attendee complained. The booth had been . . . . Continue Reading »
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