Analysis

I don’t like change.

Nine years ago, as my then-fiancé and I were deep in the throes of folding paper flowers, painting glass bottles, and designing and making our own wedding stationery, the question popped up fairly regularly: Why don’t we just elope?

"Patriarchs and Prophets" tells the story of a love that never gives up, pouring itself out to show wandering sons the way home. By examining the events and characters of the Old Testament from a range of perspectives—some familiar, others unexpected—the volume offers readers multiple interpretive keys. Perhaps the most compelling of these is the idea of a divine love that chooses us...

Let me paint you a picture of Esther Moo’s life, one of approximately 1959 Karen refugees who migrated to Australia between 2009 and 2010.

“Science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation.” (Harvard Wilson)

When I watch chicks hatch in a nest and begin to perform the instinctive behaviours of their species, I think about what we might understand about ourselves, the human species, if we had the perspective of such a privileged observer.

Have you ever seen the early morning worship programs on television? The packed congregations, the huge church venues, the smooth-talking evangelist who delivers the perfect sermon . . . Church seems to be where the action is. That there are so many new mega-churches popping up all over the world suggests that a lot of people are desperate for spiritual guidance and fellowship....

"If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light." (Victor Hugo)

I consider myself a fairly honest person. But when someone asks that innocent question, “How are you?” I’m often tempted to twist the truth.

Pietism was a movement of spiritual revival that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries mainly in Germany and Bohemia.

On May 19th, 1780, a strange phenomenon turned a sunny morning into an unexpected night. The event, known as the Dark Day, was seen as a sign of divine judgment by contemporaries and as a means of ridiculing apocalyptic expectations by sceptics.

As we know all too well, life can be hard. Even in the best of times, life can be hard. But now this, a pandemic? How are we to cope?

The train departs Bucharest, Romania’s “little Paris”—the old city section with beautiful architecture and impressive monuments, giving way to Communist-era apartment blocks. The plain outside the city is flat and featureless, broken now and again by a grove of trees—mysterious and impenetrable to the gaze. Decrepit houses, tattooed with graffiti, a splash of colour to contrast the uniform grey buildings, marching aimlessly past...

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

The stakes are high when it comes to homosexuality, promiscuity, alcoholism, violence, and the like. Previously seen as a result of environmental influence and moral choice, they have now become a genetical given.