Word: godly
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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...
...Thank you for your time. God bless...
...precisely a slap at Islam. The truly problematic text, in fact, is a mixture of quotes from the Byzantine emperor, his German translator Theodore Khoury, a medieval Muslim scholar named Ibn Hazm, and the Pope's own musings. In combination, they seem to suggest that Islam's idea of God is so oblivious to the virtue of reason that it tolerates unthinking violence in Allah's name...
...goes like this. Benedict quotes Khoury as saying that Islam understands God as "absolutely transcendent," so much so that the deity's "will is not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality." The Pope then quotes Khoury quoting "a noted French Islamist" paraphrasing Ibn Hazm, who lived in Cordoba during the 11th century, saying that "God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us." Got that? It's a lot of attribution, but I think that my colleague is correct when he concludes that "the risk...
...Benedict may wish to argue that somewhere in the minds of Islamic suicide bombers is an unstated understanding that if anyone tried to reason them out of their plans they would counter that logic had no role because this was the will of God. But that would be an assumption on his part. And that exposes the essential arbitrariness, at least for now, of the Pope's approach. If he wants to make an "essentialist" argument against Islam-that is, to suggest that there may be something in it that is intrinsically more friendly to fanaticism-then he needs...