Human Trustees

*** For the last five months a combination of projects, teaching, and family affairs have forced me to neglect my blog. I hope to get back to at least a monthly post by January, once the first draft of the Ghannouchi book translation is finally completed.   Like many others, I’ve been reeling under the shock of a Trump presidency…

This is the first blog post on this site by someone other than myself [despite my name still being on it -- to be worked out!]. This will happen from time to time, as opportunities arise. In this case, my friend Allan Christelow, Professor of History at Idaho State University (also mentioned and quoted in my last blog on the…

Who hasn’t at times confessed that if it weren’t for uncle so-and-so or aunt so-and-so, family reunions would be really nice? Families, like the wider concentric social circles growing around them, can be very diverse – ideologically, too, and even religiously. We have good friends here from the Central African Republic. Like many other tribal groups in West Africa, their…

This is the second out of three blogs devoted to my manuscript, which, as of this writing, has been sent out to anonymous reviewers by the publisher – Justice and Love: A Muslim-Christian Conversation. In the first one we looked at the main Christian source for this book, Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. For him, justice is about the inherent dignity…

As you can see from the sidebar on my homepage and as you found out last month if you follow me on Twitter, I have recently finished my manuscript, which is now called, Justice and Love: A Muslim-Christian Conversation. In this and the next 2 blogs, I want to summarize three important aspects of the book. Here I look at…

  As Christmas nears, my thoughts turn to Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories, where I taught three years (1993-96) at the Bethlehem Bible College (BBC). The family of its founder, Bishara Awad, is a wonderful example of Palestinians who, having lost their father to a sniper in their West Jerusalem neighborhood in 1948, found the grace to forgive and engage…