Religious Witness Against Torture

I know that Friedman’s views aren’t universally popular in this forum, but I particularly enjoyed this op-ed from today’s NYTimes.

I’ve been debating about whether to post something about the whole Janet Jackson breast-baring incident [warning: explicit image]. Then I got lazy, it burned out of import. Then Howard Stern got banned, and it brought up the issue again. I got lazy again (see a pattern?). Now George Carlin has gotten into the act, and while I won’t comment on his remarks on religion, he said something that made me want to write about the issue again. He said: “And yet, they’re very inconsistent — on that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson’s there was also a commercial about a…

A few new books added to our sidebar items. One is on mystical poetry and symbolism in Islamic literatures, by Annemarie Schimmel. Another is a theoretical framework for understanding some of the issues plaguing Muslim majority societies. It covers a wide-range of disciplines including religion, economics and history. The newest one is a discussion of the stories of Joseph/Yusuf found in the Hebrew Bible and in the Qur’an.