MSI Press Blog

From a relativist standpoint, values are not static ideals preserved in documents or slogans. They are living practices — enacted daily through gestures, rituals, language, and relationships. A value exists not because it is written in a constitution or creed, but because it is performed — in how people greet elders, negotiate conflict, share meals, or express gratitude. Values as Daily Performance Every culture sustains its values through repetition. Respect lives in posture, tone, and timing — in who speaks first, who listens longest. Generosity lives in how food is shared, how space is offered, how time is given. Justice lives in how people resolve disagreement — whether through mediation, apology, or punishment. These performances are not decorative; they are the substance of the value itself. Without enactment, the word becomes hollow. Transformation and Conformance When those performances change, transformation occurs. A younger generation may greet elders differently, spea...

  Islamic Humanism is one of those phrases that makes people pause. It sounds familiar—“humanism” is a word we associate with Renaissance thinkers, secular ethics, and the dignity of the individual—but paired with “Islamic,” it becomes something richer, older, and surprisingly contemporary. Islamic Humanism is not a modern invention. It is a deep current running through Islamic intellectual history, resurfacing today as Muslims around the world explore how faith and human dignity can reinforce one another rather than compete. Humanism, but not Secular Humanism To understand Islamic Humanism, it helps to start with what it isn’t . It is not secular humanism, which grounds human worth in human reason alone. Islamic Humanism begins with God, but it insists that God’s creation—the human being—is endowed with reason, moral agency, and intrinsic worth. In this view, honoring humanity is part of honoring God. The Qur’an repeatedly addresses human beings as thinking, choosing, responsible ...

Dorothy Day began as a journalist and activist, driven by compassion for the poor and anger at injustice. She sought meaning through politics, art, and love — and found only fragments. After the birth of her daughter, she felt a longing she couldn’t name: gratitude so deep it demanded expression. That gratitude became prayer. Her conversion wasn’t sudden; it was incarnational. She saw Christ in the faces of the hungry, the homeless, the forgotten. The God she had resisted met her in the streets of New York. When she entered the Catholic Church, it wasn’t to escape the world but to embrace it more fully — to serve it with mercy. Dorothy Day’s transformation reminds us that faith can begin in the ache for justice and end in the discovery of grace.  She found that love, when lived completely, leads inevitably to God.   post inspired by A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God  by Elizabeth Mahlou. Book description: It begins with a single, transforming encounter wit...

  When Doah finally emerged from those first three dramatic years—doctors trying to gain custody so they could force procedures we knew were dangerous (and his pediatrician’s research confirmed it), stealing him out of the hospital to save him, coping with trachs and plugs and clinical deaths and daily CPR—we finally had a moment to look around and take stock. That winter, eleven other children with tracheotomies at that same hospital had died. Only two survived: Doah, because we fought for him, and Peter, an older child who had already lived with a trach for ten years. We knew, with a cold clarity, that if we had not been tenacious—if we had not researched, questioned, challenged, and sought alternatives—Doah would have been one of the eleven. And we wanted the hospital held responsible. We consulted a lawyer. He listened carefully, then leaned back and said something we did not expect: “A jury will struggle with the medical complexity. Doctors carry authority. They will be believ...