…most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in...

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves ‘Persian.’ Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

No one speaks for God – not even the prophets (who speak about God)

You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.

There’s no question that homophobia is rampant among the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims – but that doesn’t negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual...

How one in the modern world views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates...

There’s nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost...

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

Whether or not you believe that after three days of being dead and entombed, Jesus got up and walked out of his own accord, what you cannot argue about is the fervent belief of the...

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single...

Whether you’re talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it’s all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required...

The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.

[…] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy […]

The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago… the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I...

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—”King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a...

‘Zeal’ is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended.