From the blog of Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible, Abraham, Where God was Born and other books:
As someone who has been to Iran twice in the last decade, including a long trip chronicled in Where God Was Born, I believe that a lot of the hype of surrounding Iran in the media these days bears an all-to-comfortable connection to the alarm that was hyped about Iraq a number of years ago, with the aid of a vicious dictator with a track record of gassing his own people. The voice of pause are too few, and too rare. But they seem to correspond to nearly anyone who’s visited the country.
John Chane is the Bishop of Washington and a friend I made through the interfaith work I began in 2002 with the publication of Abraham. Long before that book was featured on the cover of TIME and became what it became, he offered his clout to an Abraham Salon I was trying to organize in WDC. Since then we’ve done a number of events together and I find him to be a gracious and passionate advocate of moderation and humanity in religion.
Read it all.