Reclaiming America's Soul, and Islam's Soul

Paul Harvey

From different perspectives, two eloquent reminders that looking forward sometimes requires looking backward.

Paul Krugman's "Reclaiming America's Soul," makes the case for investigations of the practices of torture documented in the recently released memos, as well as the falsities of the march to war in Iraq:

America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

Stephen Prothero, "Muhammad on the HIgh Seas," calls for Muslim involvement in crafting religious solutions to piracy:

Just as Christians of good will have a duty to revisit age-old practices and beliefs that have no place in the modern world (e.g., anti-Semitism), Muslims must reckon with and revise traditions of Islamic interpretation that can be used to justify crimes on land or, in this case, at sea.