27 April 2020
Resisting vice and pursuing virtue this Ramadan
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Editor’s note: This Ramadan, Muslims around the world face challenges that go far beyond, and far deeper than, the inability to gather together for prayer or to break the fast, due to restrictions imposed by COVID-19. Like the hunger and thirst they endure throughout this holy month, the privations that accompany the pandemic are also spiritual ordeals — which is to say, they are opportunities for profound moral reflection and for ever-increasing nearness to the Divine.
We invited a number of remarkable Muslim thinkers, theorists and theologians from Australia and around the world to reflect on the vices that need to resisted during Ramadan, and the virtues that need to be pursued (much like the reflections offered by Samuel Wells and Maureen Knudsen Langdoc, from within the Christian tradition) in order for the disciplines of the month to have their spiritual benefit. While these reflections are written by Muslims for Muslims, the degree of moral and theological insight each writer exhibits commends their reflections as greatly beneficial to us all.
