Many religions see natural disasters as divine punishment. But, a scholar argues, it’s not that simple.
A detail from William Blake’s God answers Job (c. 1804). The Gods of Moses in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament and Muhammad in the Quran have a similarly complex and ambivalent character.
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The founder of Islam, Muhammad, saw himself as the last in a line of prophets that reached back through Jesus to Moses, Abraham and Noah. But while the three religions worship the same God, he divides as much as he unites.
Passion, Lament, Glory at Melbourne’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2017.
Sarah Walker
Each year at Easter, Christians recreate the spectacularly violent end of Jesus’s life, raising some tough questions about the depiction of suffering on stage.
A woman stands near an exhibit of photographs of victims of the Holocaust called the ‘Klarsfeld Pillars’ in New York.
Mike Segar/Reuters
Can the Nazis be forgiven? A rabbi explains why this question needs a more profound examination of some of Judaism’s deepest ethical mores and theological beliefs
Can Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof be forgiven — and should they? Forgiveness is not an isolated, one-time act but a longer commitment to acceptance back into a community.
April 15 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. But how did we come to commemorate the genocide of European Jewry in this way when survivors could barely speak of the horrors they endured?
A Rabbi contemplates the desecration of hundreds of Jewish graves in France, where one of the youths arrested denied anti-Semitism was their motive.
EPA/Patrick Seeger
The horrific murder of four Jewish men in a Paris supermarket has understandably provoked a debate about levels of anti-Semitism throughout Europe, including, of course, the UK. According to some campaigning…
Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has argued for Australia’s racial discrimination laws to be revisited in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Let’s be clear about one thing as the loony right once more revisits with slavering lips their thwarted desire to allow racial vilification to run untrammelled through Australian society. Nothing that…
The bodies of Aryeh Kopinsky (C), Calman Levine (L) and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg lie in vehicles during their funeral.
Baz Ratner/Reuters
The attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in which four Jewish worshippers were killed and eight were injured has sparked new fears that fighting between Israel and Palestinian could flare up once more. The…
An Iraqi man prays at the Al-Noori Al-Kabeer mosque – now draped with the Islamic State flag – in Mosul, northern Iraq.
EPA/STR
Islam has a history of violence. Muslims can be violent. Denying this is not at all different to denying that Islam is peaceful and that all Muslims are pacifists. The dichotomy is simply false. The Qur’an…