27 July 2012
World Bank on a New Course
Writing for a site “passionate about peace and human flourishing,” I want to celebrate the new president of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim. In Earth, Empire and Sacred Text, I had decried some of the misdeeds of an overly ideological World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s, and how its neoliberal one-size-fits-all approach to fixing the struggling economies…
17 July 2012
The Emir Abd el-Kader: Role Model for Today
We Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 and then spent much of the next nine years fighting “to win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi population. Imagine the leader of that insurgency becoming so popular in the US that our president handed him the Medal of Honor, and a town, say, in the UK was named after him. That man…
02 July 2012
Reconciliation Possible in Nigeria
It’s not that Nigeria is at war. But it does feel like that for many Nigerians, and especially the Christians. I begin to write this blog as my students take their final exam. I’m here in Lagos at the West Africa Theological Seminary to teach a two-week intensive course on Islam. From what I hear from my Nigerian colleagues and…
12 June 2012
Muslim Peacemaking Is Alive and Well
Over the last ten years, four Muslims have been Nobel Peace Prize Laureates – two women, and two men. Just last year (2011), the prize was awarded to three women, “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”: the Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf; her younger compatriot, Leymah Gbowee;…