What Pope Benedict Taught Me About Faith
On Sept. 12, 2006, a newly minted Pope Benedict XVI delivered an address at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria — and stirred up a terrible storm.
Mischaracterized as an anti-Islamic tirade amid the febrile post-9/11 atmosphere, the lecture inflamed vast swaths of the Muslim world. Yet for me, a Shiite-born atheist, the address became a source of understanding for my ancestral faith.
Far from an anti-Muslim harangue, the lecture offered a critique of tendencies within the West that had set it on a collision course with Islam. Benedict, who died Saturday at age 95, traced the crisis to a rupture between faith and reason that had left the world with a pair of equally lousy choices: either unreasonable faith or soulless reason.… Seguir leyendo »