Seething Update

I'll give some credit to Alan Cooperman for quoting theologian George Wiegel in today's Pope 'Sorry' About Reaction To Islam Remark on A1:

George Weigel, author of "God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church," said the pope expressed regret over the way his words have been twisted and misunderstood, but did not back away from them.

"The over-the-top reaction in the Muslim world simply underscores the truth of what he said at Regensburg, which is that unless Islam develops the capacity to be self-critical -- unless Islamic leaders take responsibility for saying to their extremists that violence in the name of God is wrong -- then there can be no genuine interreligious dialogue," Weigel said.

"There has been not the slightest backing off of that, and there can't be, because it's true," he added.

Wiegel is a bit outnumbered in the story, including by John Esposito, director of the Center of Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, the latter, according to legend, a Catholic institution.

Esposito:

But John L. Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, said that the pope "has apologized," and that an apology was appropriate because the Regensburg speech was "inaccurate and offensive."

Esposito said the nonviolent condemnations of the pope's speech by "mainstream Muslim leaders and governments" were "wholly predictable and legitimate," because Benedict began his speech on the relationship between faith and reason with an inflammatory quote from a medieval source and did not, at the time, make clear whether he agreed with it.

More along those lines. I can't help wondering if Esposito's comment is wholly predictable, which is not to say legitimate, considering his center's reception earlier this year of a $20 million gift from Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, which according to the campus newspaper is the largest in Georgetown's history. You might remember Prince Alaweed as the fellow whose "gift" to New York after 9/11 was rejected by Mayor Giuliani. Oh well, if they have that much money now, I propose the center endow a Manuel II Paleologus Chair in Interfaith Dialogue.

Cooperman takes a stab at summarizing Benedict's speech, but doesn't quite get it:

In his nearly 4,000-word Regensburg speech, the pope explored the relationship between faith and reason, lamenting that reason has come to be defined so narrowly in the West that any discussion of God is seen as "unscientific or pre-scientific." But he also denounced "unreasonable" and "violent" expressions of faith and said that in "Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

It's an amazing speech. Most of it actually dwells on the risks in the secular West when faith and reason are divorced--artificially divorced, because there is but one reality.

These days when clerics speak about this subject, most people expect to hear platitudes about how science is science and faith is faith and they can go on happily in their own separate modes. This is not that kind of speech.

Faith, Reason and the University is about the dangers --and the falsehood--of splitting faith and reason, which are two sides of the same coin of the unity of truth. The secular West sees faith as a fable, regarding reason and science as realms unconnected to a God that probably doesn't exist. In contrast, Islam risks employing a faith not answerable to reason. For a Christian this means being unanswerable to truth, and one element of truth is that conversion by force is unacceptable.

Meanwhile the world of stop calling me violent or I'll kill you keeps turning.