The majority tradition in Islamic thought gives us a powerful and stark depiction of Iblis as a failed creature, a once-glorious being fallen into the uttermost darkness. But, the Sufi viewpoint differs from this and give a rational picture of Iblis. […]
In the Islamic tradition, sometimes Iblis appears as an agent, a person, with desires and designs on humanity. But at other times, Iblis, the satanic energies, seems more like an impersonal force. […]
The Qur’an is the word of God for Muslims. For devout Muslims, there’s no distance whatsoever between the content of God’s message and the linguistic form in which it exists in the Qur’an. […]
The earliest thoughts and notions of humans about evil is that evil is somehow larger than individual human decisions to be bad, and that evil must predate or precede human malice. […]
The United States may not have been a Christian republic at its start, but it soon became one. Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism between 1780 and 1860. […]
The American Revolution gave people like Jefferson and Madison an opportunity to disrupt the spread of traditional Christianity in America. Later, Thomas Paine’s Deism arose as a sensational alternative to traditional Christianity. […]
Although the British North Americans colonies were settled by religious communities, Christianity did not have a stronghold in early America. The influence of Republicanism and Enlightenment also left little room for Christianity in the lives of the people of America. […]
Many of the apocryphal gospels were essentially novels written during the early Christian era, and they were filled with adventurous tales of shipwrecks, necrophilia, self-mutilation, and other wild stories. […]
With TV shows, hit Broadway plays, and Presidential candidates, Mormons have recently and suddenly returned to the national spotlight. How did Mormonism begin and what makes it so influential to pop culture today? […]
Moses Maimonides, the great 12th-century philosopher and legalist, lived at the pinnacle of Jewish culture in the Islamic world. What is amazing about Maimonides is that, despite making his living as a physician and having an active medical career, he was also a prolific writer. And “prolific” doesn’t do justice to describing the extraordinary output of his writing. […]
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