Religion & Law

Professor George a few days ago rightly praised the Egyptian Muslims who protected Christians in Egypt from acts of terrible persecution.  But this story reports the unfortunate decision of the highest Islamic authority in Egypt, al-Azhar, to "freeze all dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church over what it called Pope Benedict's repeated insults toward Islam."

I tend to be sanguine about conversation as an effective social lubricant to reach a modus vivendi (someone once teased me for prescribing "the talking cure" in one of my old articles).  But even I wonder what talking can do if it's deemed insulting, as the story puts it, to "condemn[] attacks on churches that killed dozens of people in Egypt, Iraq and Nigeria," or to urge non-violent forms of resistance as "effective measures to protect religious minorities."