Robert Thurman: "Buddhist Ethics" | Talks at Google

"Few ideas are more foreign to modernity

and the Enlightenment than the idea of divine revelation. Subjectivity and individual freedom are usually celebrated as cornerstones of modernity. Claims that God created man and woman in His image, that He spoke authoritatively to mankind, and that human life and death have a transcendental purpose seem irreversibly outdated. The acid of criticism -- that essential ingredient of mankind -- has not only eaten away metaphysical certainty. It has also succeeded in abolishing metaphysical questions. Instead, modernity reflects its own continuously changing crisis in a form of self-criticism that tautologically installs this very permanently changing criticism as the essence of a never completely achievable modernity."

-Stefan Wild, "Why self-referentiality?" Self-referentiality in the Qur'an, (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2006), 1.

Imam Zahid al-Kawthari by Dr. Gibril Fouad Haddad

Muhammad Zahid ibn Hasan al-Kawthari al-Hanafi al-Ash‘ari (1296-1371), the adjunct to the last Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottoman Caliphate and a major (mujaddid) of the fourteenth Islamic century. He studied under his father as well as the scholar of Qur’an and hadith Ibrahim Haqqi (d. 1345), Shaykh Zayn al-‘Abidin al-Alsuni (d. 1336), Shaykh Muhammad Khalis al-Shirwani, al-Hasan al-Aztuwa’i, and others. When the Caliphate fell he moved to Cairo, then Sham, then Cairo again until his death, where the late Shaykhs ‘Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda and ‘Abd Allah al-Ghumari became his students.

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/misc/al_kawthari.htm 

Gideon Levy: Does unconditional support for Israel endanger Israeli voices?

Thanks Sidi Namee Barakat

The Long Distance Revolutionary - Chris Hedges with Larry Hamm

Published on Aug 18, 2015

In this episode of Days of Revolt, Hedges sits down with founder of the People’s Organization for Progress Larry Hamm to dissect periods of American resistance, and explain how shifts in political climate have and will shape new modes of community organizing.

https://youtu.be/DzZ9906Oicw