Everyone should add Bret Stephens elegant little essay on the Pope’s lecture to their reading lists. It does a wonderful job in a small space. Reg Req’d. An extended excerpt:

These reflections lead Benedict to a much graver indictment of Islam: “For Muslim teaching,” he says, “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Citing the 11th century polymath Ibn Hazm, Benedict adds that in Islam, “God is not bound even by his own word.”
Let’s play that again, since the rest of the media failed to notice: Pope Benedict suggests that the God of Mohammad is, or may seem to humans to be, “not even bound to truth and goodness.” Who knows whether that really reflects a consensus view down the ages among Muslim theologians — Benedict makes his case about Islam by citing one scholar who cites another scholar who cites another. The more interesting question is why Benedict goes out of his way to use Islam as an example, since he also warns against similar tendencies toward insisting on God’s radical “otherness” within the Catholic tradition itself. So why can’t he simply illustrate the controversies of faith without going outside the boundaries of his own?
In fact, Benedict saves his sharpest barbs for non-Muslim targets: Protestantism, which seeks a “primordial” form of faith; liberal theology, which reduces Jesus to “the father of a humanitarian moral message”; scientific rationalism, the ethics of which are “simply inadequate” to answer the “specifically human questions about our origin and destiny”; and what might be called Catholic pluralism, a culturally adaptive notion of the faith that Benedict denounces as “false” and “coarse.”
These aren’t mere provocations. There is an overarching philosophical architecture to Benedict’s critique, expressed in the notion of the “de-Hellenization of Christianity.” Christianity, in his view, is shaped and defined by the great dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation. When the Apostle John says “In the beginning was the Word,” the “word,” literally, is logos — which is reason, or argument. This, according to Benedict, expresses “the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.”
That rapprochement — a triumph of dialogue — lies at the heart of Benedict’s theology: Strip faith from reason (as scientific rationalism does), or reason from faith (as Protestant literalism does), and “it is man himself who ends up being reduced.”