Watching the news about the Boston Marathon bombings was very shocking and saddening. I have personally walked in and around the area of Copley Square in Boston many times over the years that I have lived in Massachusetts. To then see it more recently transformed into a scene of premeditated...

Anyone familiar with contemporary Turkey knows that many Turks know about and consider fondly the trickster and fool, Mullah Nasreddin. Nasreddin is the subject of many stories and jokes that actually teach wisdom and he is also known far and wide beyond Turkish borders. However, there is an...

In North America, we sometimes encounter people who say that they do not recognize Islam as a religion. People hoping for some clarification on this matter from the field of religious studies will find only partial solutions as they discover that academic scholars do not all agree on a common...

American Muslims interested in dialogue with Jews actually do exist. Muslim-Jewish dialogues should be attempted, even if these seem difficult at times and even if there are people in both Muslim and Jewish communities who don't believe in Muslim-Jewish dialogue. The potential short-term and long-term benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
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In New England, we usually know about the Salem witch trials of 1692. These were made famous by Arthur Miller's play, "The Crucible," and every year loads of schoolchildren and visitors from all over the world come to visit the renowned Salem Witch Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. I would argue,...

Christians are directly concerned with and interested in the prophetic biography of Jesus Christ. Muslims are directly interested in the prophetic biography of the Prophet Muhammad and following his example. Muslims believe that both of these Prophets, Muhammad and Jesus, actually met each other.

Different narrations exist of the Night...

This review of the fatwa is being written because I've heard all kinds of speculation concerning Dr. Muhammad Tahir ul- Qadri's religious decree (fatwa) on terrorism and suicide bombings that was issued and released in 2010. But there's a lot that the speculators have neglected to mention.

It is...

In talking about motivations of Islamists, it is probably most accurate to say that there is no one motivation for all Islamists and motivations in the real world can be expected to be mixed and varied. It is easy to talk about geopolitical trends and suggest that Islamism is impacted...

After Mr. Anders Brevik's murderous rampage last year against innocent civilians in Norway, many are concerned about different types of extremism, especially about any more of these so called "lone-wolf" extremists. Others may also be wondering if there is anything that can be done to confront these and other concerns...

If you are wondering why I picked this topic to write about, it's because I keep finding out about religious organizations and their fundamentalist congregants who have a misdirected focus, either on some kind of nationalism or with a semi-concealed racism. They have lost their focus on spirituality in favor...

Proactive nonviolence is a concept often already well-known and accepted in many American religious circles. Before saying anything about some prospects for proactive nonviolence in North America, it would be silly not to recognize that much fine and important work is already being done by American men and women of...

Sept. 11, 2001 was a day that I remember vividly, sitting in a day-long graduate class on Christian-Muslim relations and interreligious dialogue at Hartford Seminary. I distinctly remember initially thinking that, all this academic material on Christian-Muslim relations and interreligious dialog that we were covering seemed to be an arcane...