As if I'm doubling back on my heritage, eleven years at an Anglican school and a long-held interest in world religions have never made me religious, but undergraduate ethics courses (which made me feel overwhelming as if Western moral theory had become so trapped within its own dichotomies, it couldn't see the stars) might have turned me into a ( Read more... )

THE BOOK OF PSALMS

91He who dwells in the Most High's shelter ( Read more... )

Roger Sandall:

'Which best nails the canard that “religion poisons everything” and that it is the main cause of “violence”? A scholarly examination of Islam’s fierce military expansion that eventually, after 463 years, provoked the counter-militancy of the Crusades? Or a philosophical trawl through the oceanic deeps and limitless intellectual ( Read more... )

Full text: "The diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue, has kept America in the forefront of civilised nations even as others regard religious freedom as something to be destroyed ( Read more... )

I became fascinated by the oral traditions of poetry and storytelling in my last couple of years of high school. While my friend so_spiffed was writing a ballad for our extension English course, I was researching Arabic poetry duels, Persian "aushek" (bards), the rituals that accompanied a storytelling session, and other details that turned out to be of ( Read more... )

Finished Jack Williamson's "Darker Than You Think" on the bus ride home, an interesting little dark-fantasy novel from the 1940s, which tells the story of the awakening of a shape-shifter and (unique from the majority of werewolf and vampire novels these days) from a male point of view. Most fascinating was picking up all the influences of the ( Read more... )

Just watched a television interview/profile on the writings and views of Philip Pullman, author of "His Dark Materials". I've always been rather put off by the books because of their ugly, childish cover art, but after listening to Pullman speak about his work, I'm certainly very interested now to read them. He pits himself morally, religiously ( Read more... )

IT'S ARRIVED! The book I ordered at Kinokuniya is here at last! And wow is it pretty. Crisp and pristine, the little dusty smudge of lipgloss off my careless finger in the translators' introduction aside.

It's Turkish poet and writer Nazim Hikmet's "epic novel in verse", Human Landscapes from My Country. The first edition containing the epic in ( Read more... )

Excerpt from From the Holy Mountain, 1997, by William Dalrymple.

Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity's Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter ( Read more... )