British ethics professor and writer for the UK’s Independent, Paul Vallely says, “Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38

Earlier this week as I was doing some research on Christian history for an upcoming sermon when I came across this fascinating journal article in The New Atlantis by Hillel Ofek.  In a relatively short post, Ofek tackles some pretty fascinating questions: What was the “Golden Age” of Islam? What

I recently reconnected with an old seminary friend of mine – Phillip Stokes.  Phillip has been very busy since seminary.  He lived in the Middle East, predominantly Jordan, for a number of years where he studied Arabic (the language of the Qur’an) along with Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, various Aramaic

Earlier this week I posted a write up I did on what the Qur’an says, based on my first reading of the Qur’an (That I might have better titled, “My First Reading of the Qur’an”).  You can read that HERE. The post sparked a conversation on Facebook with one of

You can’t understand Islam (meaning ‘devotion to God’) without understanding the Qur’an (meaning ‘reading’ or ‘reciting’) and they say that the best way to understand a book is to read it – so that is what I did.  I wanted to know what it said, not what people said it

Islam and Muslims are a hot topic these days.  Just today more people were shot and blown up in Europe – Brussels this time.  Little is known at this point about who did it beyond that at least one now dead attacker was shouting in Arabic before he died. For

[Please read Journey into Islam first] Between 2008 and 2012 the Pew Research Center conducted 38,000 face-to-face interviews in over eighty languages of Muslims in thirty-nine countries spread out over Africa, Asia and eastern Europe. It is the most extensive and up to date survey of its kind and comparable

It was the strongly polarized responses to our church’s efforts to help out a family of local Muslim, Syrian refugees this past December (2015) that convinced me I needed to know more about Islam. A young family of three that had gotten caught between a federal policy that brought them