Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Part 2

We continue our conversation with Imam Rauf, exploring the question of religious identity in a complex modern world. Rauf has served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department, as well as being an international voice for moderate Islam. We discuss the balance between the secular nature of modern diplomacy, and the desire to present an authentic self, which often includes deeply-held religious convictions. We end with a note of hope - the things Imam Rauf sees in the world that convince him that the peoples of the world can work for reconciliation and deeper understanding.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews Brad J. Kallenberg's By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is founder and chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, a multi-national, multi faith organization dedicated to improving Muslim-West relations.  In 1997, he also co- founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA); the first Muslim organization committed to building bridges between Muslims and the American public by elevating the discourse on Islam through educational outreach, interfaith collaboration, culture and arts.

Imam Rauf is the author of several books, most recently What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America: A New Vision for Muslims and the West. He is also the highly visible face of Park51, a thirteen-story Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that, for a time, was the focus of negative media attention when it was misidentified as the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

Despite the criticism he endured around the Park51 controversy, Imam Rauf has been seen more often as a voice calling for moderation in global religious disputes. He has characterized the threat to modern culture as coming not from a particular religion, but rather from the vein of extremism that can be found across the spectrum of faiths. As he wrote in Moving the Mountain: Beyond Ground Zero to a New Vision of Islam in America, "The real fault line in global religion and politics is not that between the Muslim world and the West, but rather between political and religious moderates of all faiths and persuasions and extremists of all faiths and persuasions."

Also on the Show

Katy Scrogin reviews Brad J. Kallenberg's By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering.

From the publisher's website:

"Both engineering and human living take place in a messy world, one chock full of unknowns and contingencies. 'Design reasoning' is the way engineers cope with real-world contingency. Because of the messiness, books about engineering design cannot have 'ideal solutions' printed in the back in the same way that mathematics textbooks can. Design reasoning does not produce a single, ideally correct answer to a given problem but rather generates a wide variety of rival solutions that vie against each other for their relative level of 'satisfactoriness.' A reasoning process analogous to design is needed in ethics. Since the realm of interpersonal relations is itself a fluid and highly contingent real-world affair, design reasoning offers the promise of a useful paradigm for ethical reasoning.

This volume undertakes two tasks. First, it employs design reasoning to illustrate how technological artifacts can be assessed for their inherent moral properties. Second, it uses the design paradigm as a means for bringing engineering ethics into conversation with Christian theology in order to show how each can be for the other a catalyst for the revolutionary task of living by design."