Analysis

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

“...what matters is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment...” (Viktor E. Frankl)

"On the 5th of March 1986, life left me! I was in the process of moving and that evening I felt terribly tired and cold..." (Ruth Frikart-Moor)

Not many years ago, in Romania, the internet was perceived by a large share of middle-aged and older adults as an innovation primarily for the young—a space where they played games and communicated electronically.

The Great Reformation was not a simple schism within Western Christianity. It was not just a religious and political movement. The Protestant Reformation, with its particular spirit and principles, was, first and foremost, a return to the true source and values ​​of Christianity—an attempt to restore.

I stand in the same spot where it happened 26 years ago. There’s an eerie quietness in the air; even the birds are silent. On the ground lies a small bouquet of withered flowers. The sharp Tasmanian sun pierces through the trees, partially illuminating the grounds of what once was the bustling Broad Arrow café in Port Arthur, south of Hobart.

"If I were tortured, I would confess to anything. I would confess to being the Sultan of Turkey," says Goya in a film by Milos Forman. "No, you wouldn't!" Father Lorenzo contradicts him, but Goya insists: "I would confess anything to avoid torment."

I still remember May 21, 2011, like it was yesterday. Thousands of kilometres away in Boulder, USA, an evangelist named Harold Camping, president of the popular ministry Family Radio, was in the news spotlight. He had predicted that on May 21, more than 200 million Christians all around the world would be raptured away to heaven and that five months later, the world would end.

The miracle of modern technology today is idealised by almost everyone. The way in which technology has placed the world at our feet, ensuring that we are at the centre of the universe even while lying on our couches, and that we find solutions simply by swiping our finger along a screen, has irredeemably conquered us.

His name is Bert B. Beach. Until his retirement in July 1995, he was director of the Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Department (PARL) of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

Jesus's words could not have been foreign to the Jewish people of His day. In an eminently oral culture, narratives, stories, parables and metaphors occupied an important place.

Putting Christmas on the myth-busting agenda is both an uncomfortable and challenging task—gratuitous sacrilege and pure paganism for those who believe that questioning Christmas is a sign of atheistic or conspiratorial leanings; honest, necessary Christian analysis for those interested in eliminating forgeries and freeing themselves from prejudice.

It is crucial to realise that while words can be seductive and magnetic, they can also put us in great danger if we let ourselves be carried away by their charms, driven by emotional impulses without reason.

Without ever looking for doubt I often welcomed it with interest and gratitude. I did not run away from it, nor did I treat it with indifference. I rather sought to tone it down.