April 23, 2008

Apologies for my silence. While the Pope has been in America, meeting with some of the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks, I have been in the Pope’s homeland (in Germany and also in the Czech Republic), dwelling on the atrocities of the Second World War while visiting sites like Dresden, Potsdam, and Berlin.

Apropos of religion and September 11, my son recently pointed out a Buddhist perspective on the attacks and the U.S. military response, written by David Loy, a Japan-based academic: “On the Nonduality of Good and Evil.”

If the beginning seems a bit familiar, it is based on an email message that Loy sent out in the days after the attacks, an email that hit a public nerve and was immediately forwarded around the world, virally. While some of the observations are geopolitically naive, even dangerously so, there are certainly larger truths to be gained from Loy’s thesis: that civilization must find a way to break the escalating cycle of violence triggered by Islamist fundamentalism and by the West’s long-term designs on (and military response to protect) Middle East oil supplies.