September 22, 2016

Can Someone Please Take Out the Trash? A Family Systems Approach to Lebanese Dysfunction

By Robert Hamd Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion… Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful… Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another […]
September 1, 2016

Reflections on the Burkini: Symbol of Oppression, Liberation, but mostly Power

by Martin Accad You may be thinking: ‘Not another blog about the Burkini!’ Many of us have grown tired of these divisive issues. The building of minarets in Switzerland, of another mosque in America, or the debate over whether Muslim courts with limited jurisdiction over family affairs should be allowed […]
July 8, 2016

Mission in a World Gone Wild and Violent: Challenging the Monochromatic View of Islam from a Silent Majority Position

By Martin Accad [Note: This post was first published on Fuller Theological Seminary’s ‘Global Reflections Blog,’ in preparation for Fuller’s 2016 Missiology Lectures on 3-4 November. To learn more, click here] On May 16, 2016, the day that I am writing this blog, we are commemorating the secret deal between […]
January 8, 2016

‘Religious Registration’: An Insult to Human Dignity and Decency

By Martin Accad Maryam was born a Muslim. Her society required her to live as a Muslim and eventually to die as a Muslim as well. Youssef was born a Christian. His society too required him to live and die as a Christian. But when they fell in love with […]
May 28, 2015

What Could Christians Learn from the ‘Party of God’?

by Elias Ghazal If you are familiar with the politics of the Middle East, you might be disturbed by the title of this blogpost.  That’s because the Party of God is not some right wing pro-Christian party that serves a Christian cause in the Middle East.  The Party of God […]
May 21, 2015

Faith, Identity and Empire: Ethnic Minorities in Constant Flux

By Rose Khouri Western academia is filled with research on the effects of a colonialist, imperialistic Christianity and its intersection with modern identities. As my colleague Jesse Wheeler alluded to last week, from the native peoples of the modern day United States to the descendants of Africans taken from their […]
May 14, 2015

Demographic Anxieties, Imperial Compromises and the Crucified Messiah

By Jesse Wheeler “The cool thing about Pew numbers is how versatile they are; bloggers can wear them with triumph, grief, & multiple shades of schadenfreude!” – Derek Rishmawy Early April, the Pew Research Center released an in-depth demographic study titled, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050: […]
April 30, 2015

The New Face of ISIS

Things are not always as they seem… A recent article in Spiegel sheds new and significant light on the inner workings of ISIS.  The article is based on documentation discovered in the home of one of the Islamic State’s chief architects—Haji Bakr—a former Colonel in Saddam’s Air Defense Forces—after his […]