Human Trustees

  The eyes of the world stared in disbelief at the clips of armored vehicles lunging into crowds of peaceful protesters in Cairo. Over 50,000 Coptic Christians, men, women and children, were marching on October 9 to protest the burning to the ground of a church in Aswan. Media personnel at the morgue witnessed bodies with bullet wounds and others…

[I begin a series of four blogs introducing readers to important developments in the sociology of religion – and Islam in particular. The next ones are respectively, “Is Fundamentalism Still Relevant?”, "Whence the Salafis?" and "The Global Salafi Phenomenon"]. Roughly after the “Six-Day War” of 1967 and the passing of Egypt’s socialist president Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1970, social scientists…

It’s funny how thoughts run around in our heads, bouncing off a particular memory, a conversation, or an article just seen on the web. Here’s my story about today. I think you’ll find it just as fascinating as I did.  This morning in my Introduction to Islam class I was lecturing on Islamic art and architecture. I asked the students…

[This was first posted on the Peace Catalysts Int'l website the week before 9/11 under the title, "Fear, Inc."]   The flames of suspicion, hate and fear swept over our country in the 1940s and 1950s, fanned by the zealous anti-Communist Senator from Wisconsin, mwo4meph McCarthy. Government employees, people from the entertainment industry, the unions and universities, were dragged before…