Entries for August 2007

Pre-publication buzz about a book containing Mother Teresa's private writings, Come Be My Light, occasioned an unusually strong burst of media attention last week, including a cover story in Time and coverage on all the major networks. The big news was that the Albanian-born religious who devoted her life to caring for India's poorest and most wretched underwent a long period of spiritual doubt and torment. Beginning in 1948, the year the 38-year-old nun started the Missionaries of Charity, and lasting until her death in 1997, Teresa was haunted by the loss of God's sustaining presence in her life. Struggling through her doubts with various confessors, she learned to accept this painful condition as part of her Christian journey, as important in its own ways as the missionary work that she and other nuns in her order carried out.

I wrote in a recent blog about the need for authoritative Muslim voices to take a stand on the question of whether it is acceptable for Muslims to convert to other religions. As I noted, there are different interpretations of the Muslim sacred writings on this point, some giving emphasis to the Koranic injunction that there can be no coercion in matters of religion, others citing passages from the Hadith (accounts of the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that condemn conversion as a crime.

Making sense of America's ever evolving religion scene is no easy task. Are those churches, synagogues, and mosques most successful that adapt to the needs and tastes of our time? Or are orthodoxy and traditionalism the way to win and hold young spiritual seekers? Is free-form spirituality slowly pushing aside organized religion? Are agnosticism and, yes, even atheism making forceful gains in this most God-fearing of modern industrial nations?

You can listen to well-argued affirmative answers to all of those questions and at the end be even more confused about who has it right. The simple truth is that America is a bewildering marketplace of religious and spiritual options, complicated, of course, by those who opt for life without any consoling transcendent belief.

Almost every standard world history textbook notes and celebrates Islam's golden age of science. Between the ninth and 13th centuries, Muslim scholars not only translated into Arabic the great works of Greek medicine, mathematics, and science but also pushed forward the frontiers of discovery in all of those areas. Then, toward the end of the 13th century, something mysterious happened: The scientific spirit seemed to die almost completely, henceforth enjoying only a marginal standing in the Muslim world.

Anyone following developments in the Roman Catholic Church today knows the work of John Allen. In addition to reporting prolifically for the National Catholic Reporter, formerly from Rome but more recently from New York, Allen has written timely books on everything from the organization of the Curia to the intricacies of the conclave (the process by which popes are elected) to the history and workings of Opus Dei. He also penned an intellectual portrait of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which he quickly revised after his subject's elevation to the papacy. Not surprisingly, Allen is a prime talking head for television and radio whenever something important happens involving the Catholic Church.