books I won't have time to read (1)

Unfortunately there are not enough hours in the day for this inspiring book. The video clip is powerful, though, and a reminder of the sovereign grace of God to save even when his servants do something foolish (Rassamni's wife married him when he was not a believer). How violence and hatred simply will not solve the problems of the world.

Jerry Rassamni, From Jihad to Jesus.

It reminded me of what John Piper (the link is to wikipedia as I can't get the Desiring God website to work) said soon after 9/11, like Islam the gospel does advance by death and killing and bloodshed - the blood of Christians, the deaths of Christians, the killing of Christians.

from the sublime

Cambridge Papers will shortly publish a paper on A Christian Response to Islamism, written by Colin Chapman, a thoughtful author on Muslim-Christian interactions who is pretty sternly anti-Zionist (though gracious and gentle in his manner, and a delightful guest at the Writing Group meetings). See Whose Promised Land? and Cross and Crescent, for example...

The meetings of the Writing Group certainly helped me to shed some caricatures of Islam that I had been unfairly lugging around. One caricature that remains is that Muslims don't admit they're wrong (I'm not talking about at a personal level, but at the grand level of justifying themselves or other Muslims in the political and social arenas). And then the other day I came across this remarkable editorial in a Qatari paper about the root causes of terrorism. The author, an Islamic legal scholar, dismisses the excuses (denial, minimising, socio-political justifications) and blames a culture of hate. Wow.