This week is a truly portentous one for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. In one week, we have Yom Kippur, the Day of Arafat and Eid ul Adha, and Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States. I like the term “Abrahamic Convergence” for this sort of thing – it emphasizes the commonality of themes in…

I’d like to wish my Jewish friends Tzom kal (easy fast) on the occasion of Tisha B’av, which is a day Jews are obligated to fast in observance of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Here’s more detail from Wikipedia: Tisha B’Av (lit. “the ninth of Av”), is an annual fast…

There’s a lengthy essay by Talal Asad of his father, Muhammad Asad (b. Leopold Weiss 1900 d. 1992), a convert to Islam from Judaism and one of the 20th century’s great Islamic thinkers. I found this part particularly resonant about how at its core, Islam is an appeal to reason as well as faith: The…

The narrative among Islamophobes and other partisans is that Islamic intolerance and Palestinian terrorism has forced Christians out of the Holy Land, but the reality is quite different, as reported by CBS’ 60 Minutes: The report is only 15 minutes long and is absolutely worth watching (or reading the show script). In a nutshell, the…

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