Earlier this year I was asked to participate in a project by a group of grad students from Hunter College in NYC. It was a spiritual biography of sorts. It traced lines along religion and race. The final project has yet to be published but an excerpt is now available for listening. So take a few moments to download the first in a series of podcasts forthcoming from the Manrilla Blog. It’s approximately 14 minutes in length [25MB]. Enjoy.

It would seem that every time I turn around, someone’s got an apostate story. Muslims everywhere are renouncing their Islam. Some become Christians, having found the true nature of Jesus (peace be upon him). Others simply go the atheist route. Upon dropping Islam like it’s hot, they in turn become armchair pundits, Middle East experts and overnight scholars of Islam. They write articles. They appear on talk shows. The best of them write books, making it to the best sellers’ lists. And even much to my surprise, they popped up on my blog as a Google advertisement! But what’s really behind all of this? (more…)

Today’s world is a cynical world. How often do we see the deepest, the most egregious problems dealt with a cynical hand? I heard once from a modern scholar that the only people in today’s society that have the power to critique are the comedians. But they loose their impact because they trivialize the issue by making a jest of it (whether or not that make a jest of it). (more…)