Guest Voices: Should we fear Islam? – On Faith at washingtonpost.com

Cold stones – The Immanent Frame. When I first received the invitation to contribute to “Is This All There Is,” I thought immediately of the great speculative fiction author Douglas Adams. The question called to mind the title of his novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. An open question about endings demanded an equally amorphous valediction. My goal was to write a series of seemingly unconnected vignettes, which would ultimately connect to a point and work in the number “42.” Inspired by recent resignation letters from the executive branch of the US government, which used the initial letters…

Explaining Islam to the public « The Immanent Frame. The expectation that Islamic studies scholars were prepared to “cover” the Islamic tradition and speak to its beliefs and practices on a normative, global basis was stressful for many of us. The idea that we could speak with authority about the practices of 1.4 billion people who speak dozens of languages and have inhabited the planet for the last 1400 years is absurd, of course. Like other academics, Islamic studies scholars are trained in certain fields of knowledge; in the best of programs, they are trained to be exceedingly careful about…