The most striking aspect of Richard Rodriguez’s latest book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, was its attempt to understand 9/11 in an empathetic way. His response to that atrocity was to draw closer to Islam, not to push it as far away as possible. He saw Islam as a desert religion like Christianity and tried to see what had happened to create a monstrous fanaticism of the Taliban and al Qaeda variety, and to look into his own Catholic faith for reasons as well. I was challenged by this, and wanted to talk about it. So here we have the podcast. Richard insists on the connection between Islam and Christianity, perhaps most vividly in the Arabic-rooted Spanish words of his own Catholic grandmother, and the intimacy of inter-religious conflict:
We went on to talk about martyrdom in both Islam and Christianity, and the distinction, important to me, between fundamentalism and faith:
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