Analysis

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

When we read the Gospels, we may be put off by the way Jesus Christ interprets the Hebrew Scriptures.

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (…) I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:8, 13).

Christopher Hitchens was not merely an atheist but, as he described himself, a militant antitheist. It was in his home, at his invitation, that the group known as “The Four Horsemen of New Atheism” first convened. Born in 1949 in postwar England, Hitchens was shaped by the politics and intellectual currents of the 1960s.

Life in lockdown had an atypical rhythm and texture. While for some this upset their daily lives, for others it was an unexpected response to an unspoken need.

Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was 4 years old, and didn't read until he was 7. His parents thought he was mentally disabled, and one of the teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and denied admission to the Zurich Polytechnic.

That fateful day of June 1st, 1660, was not the first time Mary Dyer wound up at the gallows. The previous time, with her hands tied and her face covered by the handkerchief of her former pastor, Reverend John Wilson, she had escaped death by the skin of her teeth, after a death sentence that had already killed two of her dear friends...

These days, we are free to believe anything and to be anything, at least in theory. However, if we gave history a closer look, we would realise that it is not beneficial for us to believe or be just anything. We agree with the biblical exhortation, often distorted by popular lore: "...test them all; hold on to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Christmas involves a financial and, at the same time, an emotional expense. Even in times of crisis, the spending season lasts longer than the holiday itself.

At the end of a journey tracing how the belief and hope in the Second Coming of Jesus have manifested themselves in the two-thousand-year history of Christianity, the final part of The Second Coming Files presents the remaining elements that link that history to the present day: the Millerite movement and Adventism.

People can’t live on bread alone. They also need hope.

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

In order to obtain money, along with the facilities offered by specialised institutions (banks, credit unions, mutual assistance services), many people resort to a series of ad-hoc financial relations, known as “personal loans”.

Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself… We experience and treat ourselves as commodities, and [as if] our own powers have become alienated from ourselves… We are a herd believing that the road we follow must lead to a goal since we see everybody else on the same road. We are in the dark and keep up our courage because we hear...

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.