{"id":5747,"date":"2006-09-18T11:40:52","date_gmt":"2006-09-18T11:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/lets-see-2.html"},"modified":"2006-09-18T11:40:52","modified_gmt":"2006-09-18T11:40:52","slug":"lets-see-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/lets-see-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Let’s see…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Pope’s Holy War – <\/a><\/p>\n

That’s the title of Jon Meacham’s Newsweek <\/em>piece on the contretemps.<\/p>\n

Once again we ask…who’s <\/em>fomenting discord?<\/p>\n

The point is, as is the case with much of the analysis, grandly missed. Meacham thinks he addresses the reason for the citation:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The pope\u2019s intentions in discussing \u201choly war\u201d were presumably good\u2014he approvingly quoted an early Qu\u2019ranic \u201csurah\u201d (chapter), which says \u201cthere is no compulsion in religion\u201d\u2014and he was right to raise the issue of how to confront and combat the religious extremism that gives rise to terror and violence. Sadly, though, he did so clumsily and obliquely, and, far from opening a constructive conversation, instead exacerbated tensions between Christianity and Islam. The episode also marks the first widely noted break with the spirit of the papacy of Benedict\u2019s beloved predecessor. A reassuring pastor, John Paul II was the first pope to visit a mosque (in Damascus, Syria, in 2000), and he managed to project an air of ecumenicism while holding fast to the fundamentals of faith and doctrine. \u201cThis is clearly not John Paul II,\u201d says R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different direction for the papacy, and reflects Benedict XVI\u2019s worries about secularism, Islam and a declining Christian vigor in Europe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Much of the Regensburg address was a meditation on faith and reason, the roots of religiously inspired violence and the need for believers to see God as a figure of love. Roughly put, his argument was this: to Benedict, Islam\u2019s conception of God so stresses God\u2019s will that God can be understood to command the irrational.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the pope, the Christian encounter with the classical world married faith and reason and thereby precluded, in principle, such misunderstandings of the nature of the God of Abraham, a nature that is, according to this argument, rooted in love and reason, not the will to dominance. Seen in such a light, \u201cjihad,\u201d which means \u201cstruggle,\u201d can too easily be taken literally (as a call to violence against others) rather than figuratively (as many Muslim scholars argue it should be).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Almost, but not quite. What is missed is the essence of the Emperor’s question:<\/span><\/p>\n

Your religious text claims there is to be no compulsion in religion. Yet you practice compulsion in religion. How do you harmonize this? <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Which is then the jumping-off point for the discussion of reason. If God’s own revelation about himself does not necessarily describe him…what is knowable? <\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Pope’s Holy War – That’s the title of Jon Meacham’s Newsweek piece on the contretemps. Once again we ask…who’s fomenting discord? The point is, as is the case with much of the analysis, grandly missed. Meacham thinks he addresses the reason for the citation: The pope\u2019s intentions in discussing \u201choly war\u201d were presumably good\u2014he…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLet's see... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/lets-see-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Let's see... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Pope’s Holy War – That’s the title of Jon Meacham’s Newsweek piece on the contretemps. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}