I finally got around to seeing this 2003 French movie Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran [”Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur’an”]. It’s such a beautifully tender story about a teenage boy befriending a shopkeeper in inner-city Paris. It’s so right where I’m at right now. It’s human, real, and apolitical, thank God. The title character, Mr. Ibrahim, is played by the awesome Omar Sharif. Damn, dude rocks, even as old as he is in the movie. I’m going to have to watch Doctor Zhivago again…

The new Boston Globe photoblog The Big Picture has taken the Web by storm since its debut on June 1. The blogger behind it, Alan Taylor, speaks here.

And how Google is beating newspapers at delivering pertinent information.

Interesting follow-up to my last post: this commentary in The Guardian.

Analysts who emphasise “al-Qaida as ideology” tend to be from the left and their analysis is thus in keeping with an approach which favours broad historical trends, stresses political, economic and social factors and minimises the effects of personal agency in explaining historical events. Right-wingers tend to favour the analyses of al-Qaida that emphasise individual actions and direction from above, whether that be “brainwashing” or the effect of charismatic leaders. Again, this mirrors a historical approach too. The latter view is usually prevalent in counter-terrorist and intelligence institutions – never known as bastions of a social science approach to conflict resolution.

A great article in The New Yorker explores how one of the most influential terrorist thinkers undermines almost every single basis for al Qaeda’s militancy, and how the “intellectual” leaders of al Qaeda struggled to respond to his criticisms. The article takes a little while to get going but, midway through, it really takes off.

I’m now using Twitter, the micro-blogging service. You can keep track of what I’m doing and what I’m up to (you can also subscribe to my Twitter feed). As you may have noticed, I’ve been blogging less, what with my job contentment and my spare writing time devoted to my novel.

We’re working on a show about Abraham Joshua Heschel, a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, an ally of his in the civil rights movement, an anti-Vietnam activist, a profound religious thinker of the 20th Century. In our interview with our guest, the chancellor of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary (where Heschel taught during his life), our guest shared some unnervingly beautiful writing of the late Rabbi Heschel that I myself would like to share. Continue reading…

Man, oh man. So, yeah, we won the Webby award in the Religion and Spirituality category, beating—get this—the BBC?! Ho-lee crap. (This is our second Webby, the first coming in 2005.)

I quite enjoyed this interview in Salon with philosopher Ken Wilber about consciousness, the different types of religion, interiority, and the romanticism of quantum physics. I am still not over his and Cornel West’s “philosophers’ commentary” in the Matrix DVD box set.

My first web feature is up on the SoF blog, and shortly will migrate over to the main site. It’s an interview with an audio slideshow. Check it out!

I’m slowly working on a new design for my blog, primarily for two reasons: first, I can’t stand the blog name anymore and feel the need to move to a new domain name, and; second, apparently leaves have been done to death (it’s too bad, because I arrived at the leaf imagery independent of the trend in web-design/Web 2.0 circles). Continue reading…