This is excellent ...

... Bryan Appleyard's post on The Pope and Islam.
Bryan wonders why the Pope used the offending quotation from Manuel II. A good point - though the quote does provide context for Professor Khoury's gloss, which the Pontiff quotes later and which echoes Bryan's own point later in his post:
"For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement [not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature] is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

By the way, the article of Bryan's that he links to - Christian Britain - is a must-read.

Catholic Taoist that I am, my own religious sensibility is well-expressed - never better, in fact - in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey":

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.