Cross Currents

Goats graze on bitter herbs and make sweet milk of it, and from the selfsame flower do honey bees derive their sweet honey and spiders their deadly poison. --Johannes Reuchlin Time: Action spans the first two decades of the 16th century, the twilight...

Those who are constitutionally disposed to speak in religious language whether they like it or not are in perennial doubt whether religious language has any legitimate uses. Worship, however physically compelling, is deeply compromised by the dynamics...

One of the best-selling poets in America is a 13th century Muslim named Jelaluddin Rumi. His words are read aloud at open-mike poetry nights and invoked at wedding ceremonies. Mainstream bookstores carry well over a dozen books of his poems and stories....

It's common for secular academics to assume that religious belief--adherence to any religious system or ideology--is fundamentally at odds with the open-minded, exploratory enterprise of critical interpretation. That was certainly my assumption two...

Try to imagine the ideological gap that exists between those who struggle to find meaning in the Holocaust and those who deny its reality. Try to see the size of it: an A-Bomb crater, a city-shaped hole in the earth. On the one side we find survivors,...

The contemporary apophatic namings of God name God as Incomprehensible. Apocalyptic also desires to name God in terms of the Impossible but not merely to render that naming in language and thought but more importantly to render it in time and in history...

Francis of Assisi went to Damietta, Egypt in 1219 with the intention of converting Sultan Malek al-Kamel, in the hope that the rest of the Fifth Crusade might be averted. After spending a week with the Sultan (during which he was able to work out a...