The French decades-long hospitality to confessed child rapist Roman Polanski, especially when held up next to Sarkozy’s nasal exegesis of the burqa, drips with pretense and hypocrisy. Likewise for the Hollywood elite who have come out in support of him.

In one month, we’re given the assignment of defrocking the ephemeral world of its authority over us, and to reinstate a spiritual bearing that helps us perceive where permanence lies.

If Ramadan were a proofreader’s pen, it would stop at “Muslim” (the professional adherent) and strike it down to “muslim” (a person who believes and remembers why).

The human creature has an inner, abstract world and also an outer organic “body” that functions in space and time. It makes no sense that revealed religion would neglect the latter.

The intransigence of the Afghani “judge” of this controversy is out of step with the very legal tradition he believes he’s upholding.

Just as Medieval Europe created fear-fantasies about Jews, “Christ-killers” who apparently ate children, so too did they produce a miasma of animus directed toward the Prophet Muhammad

As I put down Martin Lings’ book, I made a short prayer that God bless this man. The next day, I learned of his passing.

It is true that religion does not fare well when confined to an abstraction. We are charged to believe in the Unseen, not the unfelt.