Tag: salvation

The Expectations from Islam

This lecture, The Expectations from Islam, examines how reformist Muslims define the scope and limits of religion today. Moving beyond traditional accounts of prophecy’s benefits, it asks what Muslims can legitimately expect from Islam. Reformist thought distinguishes enduring, transhistorical teachings from historically contingent rulings, identifying eight permanent domains: meaning to life, knowledge of God, the Hereafter, the unseen realm, morality, ritual, quasi-ritual, and limited social guidance. While Islam offers lasting principles of meaning, faith, ethics, and salvation, reformists emphasize that secular sciences and human reason address most worldly affairs.

Comparative Religious Studies

The main goal of the seminar is a better understanding of the key concepts of Abrahamic traditions through comparative religious studies methodology. The seminar discusses theological subjects in the philosophical realm, descriptive not prescriptive, as a historian or an outsider of these traditions, not as an insider or believer. The discussions are purely neutral, critical analysis, historical, and based on modern scholarship of religious studies. Is the scripture infallible? Are Jews, Christians, and Muslims worshiping the same God? What is the initial capacity for violent interpretation in each tradition?