John Calvin

“No Reformation for Islam, Please” [CHURCH and STATE]

My “No Reformation for Islam, Please” is now republished at Britain’s Church and State site: “Islam needs reforming but definitely not a Reformation. “The history matters here, so consider first what the Reformation activists were fighting against. During the Renaissance, the dominant Catholic religion had become worldly. Its thinkers read the naturalistic Greeks and Romans

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How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series]

Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is

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No Reformation for Islam, Please [Good Life series]

[Originally published at EveryJoe.com.] Many smart people — including Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, Naser Khader in Newsweek, John Lloyd in The Jerusalem Post, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Wall Street Journal — are hoping that the Reformation will come to Islam. Some are calling for an Islamic Martin Luther. Sorry, but no.

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