George Weigel's take on the Muslim Baptism controversy

Weigel, drawing on the themes of his recent book “Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism,” said that Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Lecture “identified the linked problems at the center of a lot of turbulence in world politics today.” These problems, according to Weigel, included both the detachment of faith from reason, as shown in jihadism, and the loss of faith in reason, as manifested in western Europe and American “high culture.” The Muslim theological separation of faith from reason encourages the idea that God can and does command the irrational, such as the killing of innocents. Westerners’ loss of confidence in reason, Weigel said, “leaves the West intellectually disarmed in the face of the jihadist challenge.”
At Regensburg, Weigel said, the Pope gave the world a “vocabulary with which to deal with these problems,” which Weigel characterized as “the vocabulary of rationality and irrationality.”
HT CNS