Iranian Leader Urges More Papal Protests (AP)

Al-Qaida in Iraq warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that its war against Christianity and the West will go on until Islam takes over the world. Extremists said the pope's comments proved that the West was in a war against Islam.
+++Al-Qaida in Iraq and its allies said Muslims would be victorious and ( Read more... )

Sigh.

Ian Fisher, writing for The New York Times in a summing-up article entitled "Pope’s Regrets Over Statement Fail to Quiet a Storm of Protests," summarizes Benedict's Regensburg address as:"The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason, and shutting belief in God out of science and ( Read more... )

Here's a strikingly-provocative essay by Italy's Sandro Magister insisting that it is time for Islam to step up to the plate and embrace reasonableness and peace ( Read more... )

A cleaner version of Benedict XVI's address at the University of Regensburg that suffered such distortion. I note that this text uses the word "jihad" that I had mentioned was missing from the earlier version published, so perhaps this is corrected for vocal ad-libs or such spontaneous additions. It does make for some published select quotations ( Read more... )

Just a few more AP stories on all the fallout of the nonsense that has been made of the Pope's plea for rational religious dialogue and nonviolence between religions. Murder and arson was offered as a response to his request, apparently sparked in outrage that violence would be deemed evil by Christians, and Benedict issued a statement of regret ( Read more... )

How interesting. In the latest news story on the Pope's words, you finally see some qualification by the writer of the story - which we didn't easliy see in earlier, arguably inflamatory versions - that the Pope's words came in the context of "a broader talk rejecting any religious motivation for violence." Yet it is not reported that Benedict ( Read more... )

Predictably, the New York Times interpreted the brouhaha about the Pope in term of "tolerance." Tolerance is, I think, an idea that has gotten away from people: it has too often become the idea simply that differences are to be homogenized into some sort of un-diverse unity, rather than remaining part of our encounter with others. Equally ( Read more... )

I have added the text of the Pope's actual speech - entitled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections" - and I have included the more modest text of The New York Times from today on the matter, as well. The Pope's actual topic in and of itself would have been an interesting news item in the context of the University of ( Read more... )

Oh, the irony....

"World Islam Protests Against Medieval Christian Emperor Disliking Half His Empire Being Conquered By Muslims" The invocation of the Crusades, when medieval France came to the aid of the medieval Byzantine Empire against the (apparently harmless and nonviolent) conquests by the Muslim Seljuk Turks, is particularly silly. It is ( Read more... )

There was an interesting quotation of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI by John Allen in his The Word From Rome column today on Islam that grabbed my attention. In the 1997 interview with the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, published as The Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger makes an observation on Islam I'd not heard before, which I reproduce here with a bit of Allen at ( Read more... )