Damian Howard

Laudato si’ has been billed by many as Pope Francis’ intervention in the climate change debate, but it is so much more than that. In this detailed analysis of the Pope’s first encyclical, Damian Howard sets the text in its cultural and political context, and asks how it fits into the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. How does this ‘exciting new synthesis’ of Catholic theology and the ecological movement have the potential to change our civilisation?

the radicals have adopted Ibn Taymiyya’s theology of faith while the moderates have not. As has been shown above (and Lav acknowledges this in his book), although Saudi scholars have generally adopted Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, they have also rejected Salafī-Murjiʾī publications, and have themselves remained quietist rather than radical. The differences between Saudi scholars and radicals rest mainly on two points: first, there is the matter of declaring individuals to be unbelievers (takfīr al-muʿayyan); and, second, there is the question of who has the right to make such a declaration. The author does not deal with either of these issues. In sum, despite the lacunae and some problems in the analysis, Lav’s book makes an important contribution to the field, and one that I hope will open the door to further studies.

The pursuit of mutual understanding has not infrequently led Muslims and Christians to define their religious traditions in stark doctrinal opposition one to the other. In this regard, the “religion of law” (Islam)/“religion of grace” (Christianity) dichotomy has a particularly venerable history. This article sets out to re-examine and deconstruct a couplet that would strike many as a platitude, first by giving an account of the Sunni tradition of law-generation, situated in the broad context of the many options represented by different Islamic sects, and then by revisiting the paradigmatic understanding of law in the Christian dispensation worked out by Aquinas. This exposition leads to the conclusion that any simple opposition is to be avoided at all costs, obfuscating, as it does, much more than it elucidates. Furthermore, Christianity emerges from our chosen perspective as, in some sense, more essentially a “religion of law” than Islam ever could be.

To educate the youth of Europe? To fight the spread of Protestantism? While many people would guess that one or both of these ambitions drove Ignatius of Loyola to found the Jesuits, he actually had something else in mind: a mission to the Muslim world. For the feast of St Ignatius, Damian Howard SJ considers how ‘Islam haunted Ignatius’s understanding of his calling’ and celebrates the fruitful work of the many Jesuits who have tried to realise Ignatius’s vision in their engagement with Muslims.

Today, Muslims and people of Islamic origin represent 7% of the European population, a figure that will likely increase to 25% by the end of the century. We are on the eve of that sort of reversal of sides repeatedly threatened, in particular, by certain overseas media, but it is nevertheless a substantial change, at least in the religious landscape. How are the churches preparing for this transition in which European Christianity will be transformed by the presence of Islam? What will be the alternative to the «mimetic rivalry» model between the two religions? Notwithstanding this encounter-clash, Islam may be viewed by some European Christians as a constructive challenge.

In May 2016, Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London by 57% of the electorate, making him the politician with the third largest personal democratic mandate in Europe. Much of the publicity which attended his victory focussed on his religious affiliation; he was now, after all, Europe’s highest profile Muslim politician. Although some right-wing commentators predictably and offensively pinned the result on a pre-emptive cringe before a growing Muslim population, most saw it as a token of London’s credentials as a multi-cultural and multireligious city at ease with itself, something to be celebrated just as it had been in the city’s Olympiad of 2012.

... German Orientalism The study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945 Ursula Wokoeck 17. Mullā S.adrā and Metaphysics Modulation of being Sajjad H. Rizvi Page 6. 18. ... Ghazal 22. Islamic Ethics Divine command theory in Arabo-Islamic thought Mariam al-Attar 23. ...

This contribution offers a review of Charles D. Fletcher's bookMuslim-Christian Engagement in the Twentieth Century. The Principles of Interfaith Dialogue and the Work of Isma‘il al-Faruqi.London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015.336 pages, £68.00, ISBN: 978-1848855090.

This collection consists of a series of contemporary psalms, personal meditations born of the author’s prayer, a life’s journey with the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. Gonzalez accomplishes something rare, drawing together polarities of modern spirituality that are notoriously hard to integrate: social justice and contemplative interiority, healing and apostolic service, the goodness of transformed humanity and the ugliness of sin, just as he unfailingly puts his poetic finger on experiences which, more often than not, go too deep for words. This book is offered with the intention of helping others to live out and articulate their own experience of the Ignatian Exercises. Countless pilgrims in the Spanish-speaking world have found his words have helped them enter more fully into mystery of Christ. Now, for the first time, Gonzalez’s uniquely Jesuit gift has been made available to English speakers, so that their spirituality, too, will be nurtured towards an authentically Ignatian experience of God.

The Feast of the Ascension strikes many Christians as the poor relative of the two rather bigger celebrations which top and tail the long and joyful season of Eastertide: Easter itself, and Pentecost. Yet this feast isof the utmost significance. What are we to make of the story of Jesus being taken up into a cloud, an episode that not only sounds like mythology but also violates our modern sense of space?

lexicographers whose first source was the Qur’an itself. This descriptivist approach brings the work closer, despite some differences, to the uncritical qur’anic studies produced in the Muslim world. It is probably for this reason that the Iranian government decided to award it the book of the year prize in Islamic studies in 2015 (jointly with five other works). This re-poses the question of the challenges to Islamic studies posed by the clash between the scientific method and the Muslim public. Is it useful to produce non-critical scholarly research on Islam in order to avoid Muslim disapproval? How far, both in terms of training and in the method of analysis, should we go to ensure the scientific nature of an academic work? Are we heading for a kind of ‘failures of (nerve?)’ in the study of the origins of Islam, as Berg (2012) has put it? Many academic articles and books on qur’anic studies from doctoral dissertations defended in European and American universities indicate this regrettable trend: fascination with the Muslim exegetical heritage, hyperbole and verbosity, weakness of philological tools, lack of openness to biblical studies, humanities and social sciences, descriptivism, importing the contents of the secondary literature produced on the Qur’an in Arabic in the twentieth century, without questioning their theological and ideological underpinnings, etc. In this regard, the recent work of Hughes (2012) has sufficiently identified the risks we are running. For the student, however, the book is very useful. First, it can be read as a qur’anic index, and added to other indexes of qur’anic references and themes. A major additional benefit of the book is that it offers a discussion of the self-referentiality of the Qur’an with regard to the Bible. The author emphasizes that the Qur’an is incomprehensible without establishing first its continuity, and then a split, with the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity.

... the spread of evolutionary theory has affected the beliefs of contemporary Muslims regarding ... Another approach, whose impact on Islamic thought reaches from India to West Africa ... asking how Muslims might now proceed to address the profound challenges which evolutionary ...