I was once in Istanbul speaking at a conference on "The Coming Dialogue of Civilizations."

For those who know little history, today's battle with the Islamic State in the Middle East may seem new and unprecedented. It is not. 

A deformed theology has produced a dysfunctional culture.

Please ask yourself whether you would like others to judge Christianity based on the picture of it now being presented in the modern Western media. Then please remember the Golden Rule, and apply this to the picture of Islam presented by the same source.

Nobody is sure how it started.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilizations hypothesis a provocative preview of a twenty-first century in which religiously shaped cultural conflicts define the fault-lines of world politics created a considerable intellectual stir when it was first published in 1993.

Apologists of Buddhism describe it as the richest, broadest and most lasting of Aryan religions. Yet the name itself is of recent origin and refers to the vast system of teachings that trace their ancestry to the Indian sage, Gautama or the Buddha, who lived and died about the fifth century before the Christian era.

There is a legitimate sense in which Protestantism refers to all Christian movements, other than the Roman Catholic Church, that share the heritage of Western Christianity.

Judaism is the oldest living religion of the Western world, and historically is the parent of Christianity and Islam, which together count one half the population of the human race.