RSS FEEDAn important read
I’ve been reading a book recently that, despite all my previous exploration of this subject, has really given me new insight, information, and cause for hope. It is Dr. David Liepert’s book Muslim, Christian and Jew. In a very personal voice of experience, Dr. Liepert presents a balanced and very readable assessment that I highly recommend.
Here are two reviews of the book:
“An honest and wholehearted attempt to fulfill a task that is incumbent upon us all, whatever our faith: to get beneath the layers of self-righteousness and defensiveness that have accumulated over the centuries, to learn from the complexities of history, and to make our traditions speak with compassion and respect to our dangerously polarized world.” — Karen Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
“One danger of interfaith dialogue is that differences in theology or dogma can be so smoothed over or diluted that the integrity of each religion is sacrificed for the sake of an ecumenical consensus. Dr. David Liepert’s Muslim, Christian, and Jew takes a very different path. As much a fascinating spiritual autobiography as a plea for interfaith understanding, Liepert (who has been engaged in interfaith dialogue for many years) confronts rather than waters down differences in a textual criticism of the three Abrahamic religions. This often takes the form of an internal dialogue, particularly when dealing with his own conversion from an evangelical Christianity to what might be described as an evangelical Islam. The binding thread to this book is a recurrent and impassioned plea for the practitioners of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to transcend their undeniable differences and relatively recent past histories on the basis of that ‘Common Word’ shared by all three religions—love of God and love of neighbor—and to apply this core conviction existentially and not just affirm it.” — S. Abdallah Schleifer, Reviewer for the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, Distinguished Professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo, former Cairo bureau chief for NBC News
