In the aftermath of this month's Boston Marathon bombings, many are left scratching their heads. Why such "senseless violence"? What gain could equal the pain brought upon innocent people and ultimately the suspects themselves?

As it becomes clearer that neither a maniac loner nor an Internet game...

When on a sunny, summer day, you hear the word "Christmas," how do you react?

For years, the mere mention of this would-be jolly word sent a chill up my spine, even in July. Jack Frost, snowmen, and a baby in the manger had nothing to do with it. It...

Visualize "pilgrims."

If you just imagined early settlers in drab colors with high hats and buckled shoes, you're wrong -- and probably about more than the wardrobe. Let's look deeper at pilgrims and pilgrimages.

Pilgrimages: A pilgrimage is a spiritual journey. Some of us have made such a trip...

In Saudi Arabia the crack of the gavel meets the crack of dawn. By overturning the sentence of a Saudi woman to 10 lashes for the shameful crime of driving a car September 29, a new era is heralded for the oppressed women of the Arabian Peninsula .

Most of us prefer friendship to war. But America hasn't always found peaceful alternatives to stop aggression. Since 9//11 we've taken four steps along the path to end terrorism, but haven't yet taken step 5 -- the one with perhaps the greatest potential to de-claw terrorism, and to do it...

Our society tends to swing both ways when it comes to lumping religions: We say either that all are basically good, or that at their "fundamentals" they promote violent extremism.

Profile information is trickling in on Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. We are being told he is Christian and conservative,...

There still are places in Western Civilization where you can be shamed, quite literally.

One benefit of living in a culture based on individuality is the relative lack of shameful experiences. Certainly we have guilt. Every day most of us do something we are not proud of -- perhaps only...

Rubbery.

That describes the filling in this morning's Danish pastry from a well-known coffee chain in America.

"America's wrong about pastry filling," claimed my Danish host just a few days ago, and today's breakfast proves him right.

On a revisit to Denmark for its Free...

"We are all fine, though the earthquake itself was a kind of nightmare," a usually stoical Japanese colleague wrote to me. "I've never experienced this kind of huge energy of earthquake in my life."

The devastation brought by March's earthquake and tsunami in Japan is so enormous it's surreal to...

Have you ever taken one of those optical illusion tests where you can't see the subject of a picture until someone points it out to you? Well, that happened in Egypt several months ago with what I call the "Raisin Factor." Western travelers there were oblivious to the factor until...

As we approach the season of love and arrows, here's my shot on getting personal and cultural love write... I mean rite... actually right.

Write Love:

Write poetry? Outside of greeting cards, we don't. The days of Cyrano de Bergerac, when bakers would "improvise eloquently,"...

During the holidays we see greed and goodness -- the best and worst of humanity -- intimately entwined like the red and white in a candy cane. And this is nothing new.

Charles Dickens, who detailed his delight with Victorian toys in A Christmas Tree, awoke our social...

Although WikiLeaks' revelations bring great challenges, they shine new light and hope into American-Muslim relations. In the past, common rhetoric cast the United States as an aggressive imperialist power seeking to mold the Middle East into its image by forcing lesser foreign powers to puppet its will. Now we see...

Dust so thick it delayed the concert. Air scarce. Body crowded body in the dark. "Haram! For shame!" I scolded unseen groping hands. Calling forth inner calm I focused on my breathing. Voila! I kept alert, but panic and hyperventilation were averted.

That night by American standards...

These were some of the intrepid heroines who wore skirts on camels. Coming from different centuries and backgrounds, travel writers explored the Middle East and North Africa to discover new high and low ground - both socially...

People have been burning the Quran since the early days of Islam, but they haven't always been its enemies.

The third caliph, Uthman, became famous, or rather infamous, for Quran burning. Distressing reports had filtered to him from battlefield generals who were fighting against the Armenians and other nations on...

I can't think of any place in the world where the crossroad of cultures is more apparent than in Istanbul, a 2010 European Capital of Culture. What a fascinating city!

"I am like Turkey, like the Bosporus - one part East, one part West," proclaims a character from my novel...

I believe we should be like Canada -- free to speak, but not free to offend

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"The one who identifies the problem is not the problem," is a wise proverb used in conflict resolution. It seems obvious, doesn't it? If there is an accident on the side of the road, the passerby who calls the Highway Patrol for help is not cited for causing it.

Americans looking to Islam to take a stand against terror will be pleased that the Islamic Society of North America has issued a press release condemning the Times Square Bombing attempt. I applaud that, and hope that all Muslim leadership organizations follow suit.

However, there is...