Talking about the "things that matter most" on September 13, 2012
4:00 - 6:00 - An Act of War in the Middle East: What Do We Learn As Christians About Islam and American Secularization?
As the world now knows, Muslims in the Middle East have attacked the US embassies in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen and the Swiss embassy in Iran. The US Ambassador in Libya has been assassinated along with other US diplomats. This is an act of war. Al discusses the impact of these attacks which took place on 9/11, the Islamic response, the intellectual battle Islam is currently experiencing and how US secularization is affecting how our government, media and citizens misunderstand this confilict.
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Excellent program!
ReplyDeleteThoroughly enjoyed your talk today. Very informative and excellently presented!
ReplyDeleteVery thoughtful and well thought-out program. Thank you
ReplyDeleteLoved listening yesterday. On the comparison btw the Islam and the west, among the big issues are the notion of our relationship to God, and the nature of sacred texts. Scott Hahn has distinguished that for traditional Catholics, Protestants and Jews, we understand that God is our loving Father, but for Moslems, God is sovereign, irrational, and not loving...Gid is Master, and people are his slaves. Also, the Bible is written by inspired prophets and evangelists, and is subject to interpretation. THE Koran, quite differently is seen as the direct writing of God. So in the west, a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible is an extremist error. But for Islam, the sacred text is not subject to interpretation, fundamentalism is the default assumption. Pope B16, in his Regensburg lecture, spoke lucidly about how for Catholics, because God is loving, he is rational. But Protestant theology subordinated the God of Reason to the God of Sovereignty. So the use of reason was increasingly abandoned in the west. So reasoning, which is the basis for discourse, has been abandoned in both Islam, a theocracy, and in the west, a secular state. Ironically, the only thing that theocratic Islam and western secular democracies have in common is a high reverence for the state, one under an irrational God, and the other simply irrationl.
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