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You can love a romantic partner, but also a pet, a book, God, or the sound of someone’s voice. We need many more words for love.

In “The Immortality Key,” Brian Muraresku speculates that the Eucharist could have once been more colorful.

A single knife is sometimes worth more than a thousand armies.

He is only out-sold by William Shakespeare and Lao Tzu.

Alchemy had its golden age in the 17th century, when it counted Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle among its adherents.

Once a cosmopolitan faith, Islam valued intellectualism and modernity. It was derailed by various geopolitical and religious forces.

A new book by historian and author Paul Strathern argues that the Northern European Renaissance has long been overlooked.

The Church of England is debating if believers should stop using gendered language when talking about God.

When we call something ugly, we say something about ourselves – and what we fear or dread.

The West has been doing well scientifically for a few hundred years now, but it took almost a thousand years for it to catch up to the Middle East. Here are ten of the biggest discoveries the Islamic world got first.

We can all rattle off a few Greek philosophers to win a trivia prize, but how many Golden Age philosophers are you familiar with? Here’s a primer.

Science Guy Bill Nye is thrown a deep religious hypothetical: If there is a god that is truly good, intelligent and all-knowing, should we submit to its governance?

After then-president George W. Bush phoned Jacques Chirac, his French counterpart had to consult a biblical scholar to make sense of the conversation. 

A bizarre Islamic splinter lodged deep in the body of Europe.

The Cyclops Polyphemus as a Metaphor for Western Civilization and its Linear Way of Reasoning “The Greeks only understand theories, but the Chinese are the people who own the technologies.” […]

One of the country’s most conservative religious parties sets the record straight after a statement was made on Christmas asking non-Muslims not to use the word.

This article was previously published on AlterNet. For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became […]

The Italian Renaissance remains one of those amazing hinges of human history where civilization made a great leap that continues to be felt today. For German art historian Hans Belting, […]

Do you have to be religious to see a face in burnt toast? Probably not, but believers are more likely to attribute such a face to Jesus (1). Believer in […]

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Simon Henderson has this piece on the Huthi conflict.He suggests that the reason for the renewed conflict in August was that fighters of […]

Williman Maclean has this report in Reuters, which continues to pour cold water on the NY Times’ article suggesting al-Qaeda is relocating for the summer. The article cites Thomas Hegghammer, […]

I’ve never understood people – usually much more important than me – who have their research assistants draft their op-eds before they polish and print them.But still when I saw […]

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of al-Qaeda’s assassination of Muhammad Rubaysh, a security official in Marib. Mareb Press has an article about the event, which includes the kind of biographical […]

Post #38 of this blog showed a spoof map of the world, supposedly according to Ronald Reagan – the avuncular 40th President of the US, an icon of conservatism to some, […]

When evangelist Franklin Graham—son of the better known Billy Graham—had his invitation to the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service rescinded after Muslim members of the military complained about comments […]

Two further churches have been firebombed in Malaysia yesterday, bringing the total to six, as the row over the translation of Muslim “Allah” for the Christian “god” escalates.