Human Trustees

Implausibly, the first Muslim to be received at the White House who was not a foreign dignitary was in fact an African slave who had endured hard labor for thirty-nine years. Through a set of amazing “coincidences” Abd al-Rahman Ibrahim (“Abraham, son of the All-Merciful”) had been released by his Mississippi master to be sent back to Africa, but to…

There are times in the history of God’s dealing with humanity when the wall between the human world of time and space and the invisible, supernatural world of God and angels becomes paper-thin. That’s when angels appear. Think of Jacob’s dream of a ladder connecting heaven and earth with angels walking up and down. God, at the top of the…

I find it fascinating that God’s glory in both Qur’an and Bible revolves around Moses and his prophetic role at Mount Sinai – except that, as we will now see, this theme thoroughly permeates the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament – I’m hoping Jews will enter this dialog as well!). As we learned from the Ayatollah Khomeini in the first…

Here I begin a three-part comparative look at the theme of God’s glory in the Qur’an and the Bible. I haven’t seen this done before, but the idea came to me recently as I was meditating on II Corinthians 5. God as light is a central concept in both traditions and extending this metaphor to God’s glory will enable us…

Is God just? If you look at all the injustices of this world – innocents suffering everywhere, powerful oppressing weak at will, and evil systems suffocating the righteous – the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. That’s the problem of evil (how to reconcile an all-powerful God with the doctrine that he is also good or totally just).…

Two things just happened that will come together in this blog. First, I came back from Singapore, where I lectured on the theme of justice from a secular, Christian and Muslim perspective. This was for Pathways for Mutual Understanding’s first Institute in Asia. Second, my review of David Bertaina’s 2011 book, Christian and Muslim Dialogues: The Religious Uses of a…