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The U.S.
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During the Middle Ages—the historical context for the rise of what would come to be known as the “just war” tradition—violence under any circumstance was deemed a great evil by the church. In official Catholic teaching, combat was accepted as...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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By the time Ali (not his real name) reached Azerbaijan, the most difficult part of his long journey was supposed to be over. He had left his father, wife, and one-year-old son in their village in Afghanistan, trekked across his war-torn country,...
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The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
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Late in the summer of 1219, Francis of Assisi crossed enemy lines during the Fifth Crusade, hoping that he could convert Egypt's Sultan Malik al-Kamil to Christianity. Francis, who had begun his ministry after recovering from the trauma of a...
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Martin E. Marty, Philip Kennedy, Robert P. Imbelli
On September 5, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the declaration Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church
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“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama told the world in announcing that U.S.
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BETTER EXPECTATIONS
I had just finished reading Mark Bowden's 2006 book Guests of the Ayatollah when I picked up Commonweal and read William Pfaff's column on Iran, “The Enemy Within” (July 17), which is rife with errors concerning the 1979 hostage...
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On August 13, two Islamic television networks were ordered by the Lebanese government to discontinue their broadcasts of The Messiah, an Iranian movie about Jesus originally released in 2008. The order was announced by the Lebanese minister of...
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In Fünf Jahre meines Lebens (“Five Years of My Life”), the most powerful memoir yet published by a former Guantánamo detainee, the German Murat Kurnaz remembers an especially disturbing episode that took place while he was in a cage at Cam
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Social commentators lament the lonely individualism of Americans, and pinpoint the loss of community as a source of malaise. We detach ourselves all too soon and completely from our roots, cocooning our lives within 24/7 jobs and the sort of...
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The drawdown of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, announced by President Barack Obama on June 22, is fraught with uncertainty and risk. In a country where armed conflict has persisted for decades, the dangers of renewed civil war are everywhere...
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Early last year, the Ministry of Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran awarded its World Prize for the Book of the Year to The Banquet: A Reading of the Fifth Sura of the Qur’an—originally published in French as Le Festin: Une lecture de la sorate...
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In the past nine years, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been invoked, distorted, and exploited to serve a variety of political and ideological agendas. But no such effort has been quite as shameful as the current campaign against...
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Ten years after the terrible devastation of September 11, we live in sacred time.
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Since the dreadful events of September 11, 2001, Americans have been living in a world riven by antagonism between Muslims and non-Muslims, a polarization arguably not seen since the medieval period and the Crusades of Christian Europe.
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Where is the moderate Muslim voice? Political commentators have repeatedly asked this question in the cacophony of the “war on terror” and amid daily news reports of violent acts of Islamic extremism. Yet when a moderate voice is raised, we stand a...
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The great religious battle of our time is not the one being waged between believers and unbelievers. To be sure, that is an important and certainly a noisy conflict—never before have the voices of religion’s despisers been more numerous, loud, or...
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The Arab Spring began with the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia (a name stemming from Tunisia’s national flower). The immediate cause of the revolution in Tunisia was a tragic act of protest by Mohamed Bouazizi, a young man from a small town in the...
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The controversy over Pope Benedict’s September lecture in Regensburg and his use of the now infamous quote from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus condemning Islam was a perfect storm. But it was not the first time that stern words and...
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Taking their inspiration from the Qur’an, Muslims refer to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and a harder-to-define faith community, the Sabians, as “People of the Book.” These monotheistic neighbors of Muhammad (c.
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The democratic uprising that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt stands as one of the most dramatic expressions of “people power” in history. The people’s victory in Egypt was preceded by the downfall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and...
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The October online posting by WikiLeaks of nearly a thousand classified Pentagon documents (the “Iraq War Logs”) shed new light on the vexed issue of Iraqi deaths during and after the 2003 invasion.
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History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators.
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The festivities were over and life in Esfahan, Iran’s third largest city several hundred miles south of Tehran, had returned to normal. The metal scaffolding in front of the Iman Mosque in Khomeini Square had been taken down and the square’s...
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By now, much of the world knows about the uproar caused by Pope Benedict XVI’s September lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria. In his lectio magistralis Benedict quoted a text of the fourteenth-century Byzantine...
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The federal trial of Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who was once thought to be the “twentieth hijacker,” has entered the sentencing phase and seems certain to end in a death sentence for the hapless would-be terrorist. Moussaoui...
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From my student days, almost forty years ago, when I hitchhiked with a backpack on my shoulders and a guitar at my side, I’ve been an eager traveler in the Middle East, fascinated by the rich historical resonance and complex politics of this region.
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Pope Benedict XVI has issued a series of apologies for the ill-conceived remarks made in an academic lecture in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman.” At least in one sense, then, the pope appears to agree...
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In 2000, twenty-five members of my family returned to Vietnam, many for the first time since leaving the country as refugees a quarter of a century earlier. Our nostalgic tour included a visit to the buildings of the Catholic high school where I...
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In his four-year pontificate, Benedict XVI has managed several major and costly missteps, particularly in his relationships with Muslims and Jews. Fortunately, he has proved personally adept at making necessary and well-received amends, however...
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In the winter of 1964, Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published a collection of articles titled “A New Europe?”
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For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research in New York newspapers on the anti-Catholic vitriol the Irish faced in the nineteenth century. It’s been hard to avoid noticing how similar those attacks are to the biting comments being made...
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Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. Kevin DeWine, the affable chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio, has a transparent board behind his desk at state headquarters...
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The Obama administration is clearly determined to reverse Afghanistan's slide into chaos. Since January 2009 we have seen a new military commander and ambassador in Afghanistan, a re-examination of strategy, and the beginnings of a “surge” in...
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In 1995, I had the good fortune to take a stroll with Heinrich Dumoulin, the great Jesuit scholar of Buddhism, in the garden of the Jesuit residence at Sophia University in Tokyo. Dumoulin told me of a remark the historian Arnold Toynbee had made...
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The first decision made by General David Petraeus as successor to General Stanley McChrystal as commander of international forces in Afghanistan has been to abandon the policy he himself drafted in order to win the war and rebuild Afghan stability...
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Ask most people in the West what images they associate with the words “Middle East” and you’ll likely get descriptions of oil wells, desert dunes, and men in flowing robes and Bedouin headgear. More recently, you might hear of crowds filling public...
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Middle Eastern travel presents one hazard few foreigners are aware of—the risk of becoming a hospitality hostage. And nowhere is the threat more serious than in Syria.
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To reach the Monastery of Saint Moses (Mar Musa in Arabic), you’ll need determination, patience, and a good pair of walking shoes. Yet while it may not be easy to get there, many people find it even more difficult to leave.
I first heard...
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Every week for the past five years, there have been news stories of U.S. soldiers being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan; stories of Israeli Jews either attacking or being attacked by Palestinians; reports of sectarian Sunni Muslims in Baghdad...
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My wife was raised Catholic and converted to Judaism six months before our wedding. Her conversion was not one of convenience or social pressure—she flirted with Orthodoxy and Conservatism until I steered her to Reform Judaism. She attends temple...
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In the third century, according to legend, seven young Christian men from Ephesus refused the Roman Emperor Decius’s command to sacrifice to idols. They had to flee the city and ended up hiding in a cave. Then, like the disciples in the garden, they...
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At 4:30 a.m. in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I am woken by the local mosque’s call to prayer, followed by the imam’s sermon. Not long after that, the bell of the Catholic center where I’m staying calls the nuns and Catholics in the neighborhood to daily...
