Reason & Regensburg: Pope Benedict and the Dialogue of Cultures

To bridge the cultural rift between Islam and the West, there is an urgent need to reestablish the mutually reinforcing dialogue between faith and reason in the West, and to support moderate Muslim scholars attempting to retrieve a non-voluntarist interpretation of Islam, often at risk to their own lives. Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at The University of Chicago, and is also in the Department of Political Science and the Committee on International Relations.