Word: benedicts
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Israel is a major stop on Pope Benedict's journey and a focal point of Western involvement in the Middle East. And while support for the modern revival of the ancient biblical nation runs deep among many Christians in America and Europe, the creation of Israel has been a disaster for Christians in the Middle East. Many of the Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 - never to be allowed back - were Christians. The flood of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon helped spark a civil war between Muslims and Christians there. And the ongoing occupation...
Ever since the year 1204 A.D., when the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade sacked the Christian city of Constantinople instead of "liberating" Jerusalem from Muslim rule, Christians in the Middle East have been understandably wary of emissaries of Rome. Today, as Christians in the Middle East welcome Pope Benedict XVI on his first trip to the Holy Land, many are worried that the unpredictable Pontiff might stir up passions at a time of religious strife and political cold war. "The thing that worries me most is the speech that the Pope will deliver here," said Archbishop Fouad Twal, the Latin...
...with the contemporary interplay (or lack thereof) of faith and reason, and the risk of rising inter-religious conflict. Speaking after a visit inside the al-Hussein Ben-Talal mosque, the Pope acknowledged that "tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied." But Benedict said that Muslims and Christians have a shared obligation to counter the contemporary idea that "religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world." Instead, he said, faith is in fact necessary in a world in which reason alone can become a form of extremism. "When human reason humbly...
This idea of a faithless allegiance to reason as the cause of rising secularism is a concern of both Muslim and Christian leaders, and was a much less cited theme of his Regensburg lecture. But the source of tension two years ago was the flipside: Benedict's contention that Islam has an absolutist conception of God that doesn't leave room for reason. On Saturday, however lightly, he seemed to return to this point. "Christians describe God, among other ways, as creative Reason, which orders and guides the world," the Pope said. "Muslims worship God, the Creator of Heaven...
Speaking before the Pope on Saturday, Prince Ghaszi Bin Muhammad Bin Talal, the top religious advisor to the Jordanian King, thanked Benedict for having expressed regret for "the hurt caused by the [Regensburg] lecture to Muslims" and for other words and gestures since. Still, Ghaszi pointedly condemned "distorted depictions" in the West of the roots of Islam as "responsible for much historical and cultural tension between Christians and Muslims." He said it was now clear that the Pope's comments about the prophet in 2006 was just "a citation in an academic lecture," but added that it is incumbent...