Islam and Terror

 

To anyone who can see this post beyond Google's firewall. Isn't it interesting that Google does not want you to have access to this image or this content? 

Islam and Terror

Islam is different from all other world faiths

A note for the reader: I'm from New Jersey, and I've lived in Africa and Asia. Thanks to my background, I've lived among Muslims my entire life. In Paterson, NJ, the call to prayer reaches inside my apartment. In the Central African Republic, I lived mere steps away from a madrassa. I witnessed tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christian and Animist Africans. Those tensions eventually burst, after I left the CAR, into a potential "genocidal" conflict.

I've had Muslim friends, students, co-workers, health care professionals, and bosses. We can love our Muslim friends and neighbors, and still criticize concepts like jihad, gender apartheid, and dhimmitude.

Twenty-five years ago, after 9/11, I thought to myself, "One good thing will come of this. Americans will finally talk frankly about Islam." But that didn't happen. Powerful voices in media, in pulpits, and in classrooms blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy. Any honest critique of Islam – the exact kind of searching inquiry we devote to Christianity, democracy, capitalism or Marxism – was denounced as "Islamophobic," "racist," and beyond the pale of decent discourse. Cultural relativism was deployed to silence critique of Islam. "Christians do bad things! What about the Inquisition!" Those who used this tactic inevitably revealed themselves to be woefully ignorant of recent scholarship on the Inquisition, and also completely uninformed about any aspect of Islam.

In frustration, I wrote the essay, below. The Answering Islam website ran it, and Front Page reruns it today, because, unfortunately, the public conversation about Islam has not changed from twenty-five years ago. Cultural relativism, claims of "racism!" combined with tragic ignorance still inform our public discourse.

Desert Fathers; Tish Harrison Warren; Jen Hatmaker; Tony 2026 book and movie reviews

 

Desert Fathers; Tish Harrison Warren; Jen Hatmaker; Tony 2026 book and movie reviews 

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren was published by Convergent, an imprint of Random House, on May 12, 2026. It is 192 pages long. Warren is 47 years old, married, and the mother of three. For her previous two books, Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night, Warren has won two Christianity Today awards, as well as an Intervarsity Press Readers' Choice award, and an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book of the Year award.

 

What Grows in Weary Lands argues that the Desert Fathers and Mothers offer guidance to Christians today. These Fathers and Mothers retreated to monastic desert lives in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in the third century AD. Their wisdom is available to modern readers via a collection titled Sayings of the Desert Fathers. In spite of this title, the collection includes quotes by Desert Mothers as well.

Questions for Muslim Candidates

 

Questions for Muslim Candidates

No more softball

 

The essay, below, briefly discusses how the Judeo-Christian tradition affected American democracy. It summarizes how Protestant America reacted to Catholic candidates. It ends with questions that should be put to Muslim candidates.

 

Part One: A Brief Look at the Impact of America's Judeo-Christian Foundation.

The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan Movie Review

 

The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan

 

One movie lover's response

I Stand with the Jews. Part Two of Two Parts

 

"I Stand with the Jews"

What does that mean?

Second of two parts

A canopy of oaks and maples rose overhead. Green understory surrounded me: pinxter azaleas and thorny Japanese barberry. Bluets – tiny wildflowers – blossomed underfoot. Up ahead, Marc approached me with his typically hale and hearty, "Hello, Danusha!"

I shoved my rosary in my pocket and removed my headphones. I had been cheating. I should have been focusing, with the binoculars around my neck, on the migrating spring warblers that make Garret Mountain famous among birders. Instead I was listening to Gregorian chant and praying the rosary as I hiked. "Hello, Marc," I said, as I migrated from internal contemplation of the eternal to external society and the ingeniously plumaged sprites zipping around us.

"Look at that color!" Marc exclaimed.

I pointed my binoculars in the direction Marc indicated. He had spotted a purple finch.

"I can see," I said, "Why Roger Tory Peterson called them 'a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.'"

Marc is, by many estimates, the best birder in the state. Of course we are all, in our own ways, the "best" birdwatcher in compliance with our own needs and desires, but Marc racks up awesome numbers of the species he sees annually.

Marc's surname harkens back to Chelm, a city in Poland once famous among Jews as a site of folkloric fools. My favorite Chelm story: the local wise men declared that if you drop a buttered slice of bread, it will always fall on the buttered side. This conclusion reflects the pessimistic worldview typical of both Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe. Of course, eventually, someone dropped a buttered piece of bread and it fell buttered side up. The wise men of Chelm debated this astounding event and determined that the slice had been buttered on the wrong side. Chelm stories arose from a culture that valued scholarship enough that it could spoof scholarly folly.

Mindful of Marc's identity as someone other than our state's best birdwatcher, I wondered if I should say something.

I had told myself, if the opportunity arises, I will say something.

Was this the moment, though, to say something?

I felt timid, but also determined. If we keep waiting for the perfect moment, we never say anything.

"Marc," I ventured. "I want to say something about something other than birds."

"Yes?" Marc said, turning his attention from the purple finch to a streamlet that might be playing host to a Louisiana waterthrush.

"There's been a rise in antisemitism."

"You think?" Marc said, his voice rising, in an atypical, for him, sarcastic comment.

"Yes, and I just want you to know that I'm not Jewish…" said the woman who had been praying the rosary and listening to Gregorian chant. "But I want to be an ally. I'm on your side."

I'm glad I said something. If the moment arises when Marc could use some support from someone like me, he knows I'm here.

I Stand with the Jews / Part One of Two Parts

 "I Stand with the Jews"

 

What does that mean?

 

First of two parts

 

The other day, an antisemitic comment came through my social media feed. I didn't want to debate the poster. People who say abysmally stupid things do not deserve the respect implied by debate, nor do they deserve the attention that debate generates. But I did not want his comment to go unanswered. All I said was, "I stand with the Jews."

 

"What does that mean?" the antisemite challenged.

 

This essay offers my response to his question.

Pressure Movie Review. Yes, we do need another D-Day Movie

 

Pressure 2026

Yes, we do need another D-Day movie

I walk a lot. I check NOAA's forecast five times before heading out. If there's a ten percent chance of rain, I have a Gore-Tex slicker in my daypack. I'm always over-prepared for weather. One day I was walking down Ratzer Road, a road I've walked hundreds of times. I passed wide lawns and suburban McMansions, some of them costing a million dollars. I felt carefree. That did not last.

Boom. In the time it took me to type the word "boom," everything changed. The sky turned black. Forty-foot evergreens swayed so drunkenly I feared they'd lash me like the tail of a lunging tiger. Pelting hail obscured my vision. With every step I pushed against a locked door – the wind was that determined to prevent me from moving. I recognized that this is the kind of weather that kills. I frantically sought a nook where I could take shelter in this, not my neighborhood, and, again, that fast, it was all over. The sky was suddenly dove-gray. The hail relaxed to a light drizzle. The Apocalypse was canceled.

My best guess is that I was stuck in a dangerous phenomenon called a "microburst." Microbursts damage structures, cause car accidents and plane crashes, and they do kill. Ultimately, though, what it was, was weather.

In Indiana, after a tornado, I heard of a grandfather trying to hold back his grandson, to no avail. The tornado pulled the tyke out the window. In 2011, in Paterson, NJ, I was evacuated during Hurricane Irene. The Passaic River was coming up through the floorboards. Within hours the entire neighborhood, for a mile around, was under water. In 2012, after Hurricane Sandy, for most of two weeks, we had no electricity and substandard tap water. In 2021, thirty New Jerseyans died during Hurricane Ida. One victim drowned on the very non-aquatic Lackawanna Avenue, near a Best Buy and a Barnes and Noble. Two people tried to rescue her, but these Good Samaritans had to themselves be rescued by fire department crews. Her body was never found.

Weather.

We humans have dominated much of nature. We have extended average lifespans, conquered smallpox, and manipulated the landscape to our whim. But we are still mere playthings in the hands of weather. A new film, Pressure, examines the impact of weather on a history-making event: D-Day.

Perhaps no human accomplishment supersedes D-Day as an expression of humanity's power. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. On June 6, 1944, almost 160,000 Allied troops landed on Normandy's beaches. These included troops from the United Kingdom, Canada, and twelve other Allied nations. Over 7,000 naval vessels and 12,000 aircraft participated. An estimated 100,000 French resistance fighters coordinated, via coded messages, with overseas planners and carried out crucial and meticulous preparatory operations behind enemy lines. For example, the French derailed Nazi supply trains inside tunnels. Repairing a train derailment inside a tunnel is much harder than doing so in an open field. By the end of June, Allies had delivered 570,000 tons of supplies. By the end of August, two million Allied troops were in France.