Word: faithful
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...taking hold. Second quarter earnings for banks will have to be relatively strong or the hope of a rebound in the sector, which the "stress tests" indicated is possible, will dwindle. Investors may begin to think that the test criteria were too liberal. If that happens, the public's faith in the capacity of the federal government's ability to find systemic problems in the financial sector and solve them will diminish quickly. Nothing could be worse than the perception that both the regulated and the regulators have lost their ways. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...reason to be concerned about the exodus from the Middle East of Christians, who once constituted 20% of the population, but whose numbers have fallen to just 2% now. The presence of Christians in the Holy Land is both an important symbol of continuity with the origins of the faith, and a reminder of the multisectarian and tolerant history of Arab and Islamic culture. That culture of tolerance is today under threat from the rise of religious extremism. But clash-of-civilizations pundits and Western leaders like the Pope often ignore how the West helped spark such intolerance, especially through...
Indeed, it is in dissecting this Pope's ideas - often now cloaked in more diplomatic language that was absent in Regensburg - that we can see that he is still preoccupied 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...
...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 and Earth, who has spoken to humanity." The Pope seems to still believe that this distinction - between Christian faith that is "purified" by human reason, and Muslim faith that is simply received from God - is worth deeper exploration with his Islamic counterparts. (Read about the five things the Pope must do on his Mideast trip...
...spokesman Father Federico Lombardi was asked afterwards whether the Pope's view on Islam has changed since Regensburg. "It's a journey, there's progress," he said. "We have to learn from what the Muslims tell us about Islam." This Pope has sought to infuse "frankness" in the inter-faith dialogue that was a cornerstone of John Paul II's papacy. But talking about both what unites and divides different religious traditions, requires not only talking frankly but listening carefully...