Word: benedicts
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...context in which Benedict XVI spoke the words that sparked ire in the Islamic world seems utterly ironic. The lecture was titled “Faith, Reason, and the University” and presented at a renowned German university, Regensburg. More importantly, the speech was an enlightened analysis of faith and reason in the modern world...
Essentially, Benedict XVI was debating freely and openly like Manuel II and his Persian interlocutor had once done. Drawing from other speeches given during his Bavarian escapade, and last year’s encyclical letter entitled Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), we can conclude the once-called “rottweiler” Cardinal Ratzinger molded into a truly ecumenical pontiff. He quotes enlightened philosophes, concelebrates with rabbis and patriarchs, and is quite fond of neo-Platonic reasoning in his homilies. He even repeatedly quotes passages in the Qur’an. In short...
Educated Muslim scholars are right to deny Muhammad’s teachings were violent, but they should be more concerned about their brothers in faith than with folks in Rome, Paris, or Berlin. An Iranian hardliner like Ahmad Khatami opined that Benedict and Bush have “united in order to repeat the Crusades.” If those words do not seem extreme enough, Salih Kapusuz, from the governing Turkish party AKP expressed that the Pope “is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini...
...words remain words, and our Western tradition of freedom of expression should protect them all. But the reactions in the Muslim world did not end there. On Sunday night, churches in Palestine burned with Molotov bomb cocktails. The same day Benedict expressed regret for the world’s reaction to his words, a nun in Africa was shot four times in the back in an attack reportedly related to the speech. Sister Leonella Sgorbati was 65 years old, and worked at a Somali children’s hospital far away from her Italian homeland. If the reactions...
Toward the end of his lecture, Benedict said, "It is to this great Logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." Indeed, just last month, on the 20th anniversary of that first Assisi encounter, the Pope sent to the Bishop of Assisi a written message that heralded John Paul's promotion of peaceful dialogue among religions. If Benedict can acquire enough of his predecessor's political touch, the theologian's hard thinking may help the West begin the difficult conversation with its Islamic brothers--one that includes a clear definition of differences...