Word: religion
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...both an avowed skeptic and who was once sentenced to death by Iran's spiritual and political leader, Salman Rushdie is remarkably open toward faith. It's not that he's got it. "I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of where do we come from and how shall we live," he said Thursday at the opening of Columbia University's new Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. "And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions. Regarding origins, I think you can say [they are all wrong...
Over the last few decades, the secular study of religion on America's campuses has become a right-wing pinata. In the full understanding that they are swimming against the cultural, if not the academic, stream the folks at the new Institute pulled out Rushdie, who, although he is not one of their faculty members, writes fiction that acknowledges the centrality of faith to culture without the author's pious participation. From his astounding breakthrough work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point...
...fatwa - now more or less lifted - did not sour Rushdie from his conviction that religion is necessary to writers, if only because it provides the only available language on certain topics. "I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words," he said. "For instance, 'soul." I don't believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn't a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you're religious or not you may find yourself obliged...
...professor of English and Comparative literature, Rushdie expressed a deep appreciation for the outward expressions of faith. "I grew up looking out my window at Kings College chapel [the iconic building at Cambridge University, which Rushdie attended]," he says. "And its hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty" with that sight in his memory. He then expressed wonder that, as a non-Christian secularist, he was invited in 1993 to preach a sermon in that same chapel and did. "There are moments in your life that surprise you," he said...
...version of a normal life: there was no obvious security at last week's event. But that experience allowed him to make a strong indirect point in favor of the new Institute. Conservative clerics and talk show hosts have complained bitterly at the way that secular universities treat religion - sometimes justifiably. When scholars insist on seeing faith as a brute exercise in authoritarianism they are being almost as reductive as religious fundamentalists. But at its best, secular religious study continues to offer a freedom that institutions entrenched firmly in one or another faith tradition can simply not afford...