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I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

For many Christians, the belief that souls go to Heaven or Hell after death is a cultural legacy rather than a conclusion reached through personal analysis of the biblical text.

A lack of self confidence is like a stain that doesn't go away by itself. It is like oil dripping out of a machine, its drops collecting in the puddle of an inferiority complex. Such a problem is difficult to mitigate, even with motivational speeches or hopeful injections of fragile optimism.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus asked us to remember the Lord's supper. What made it so special?

"The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice" (Peggy O'Mara).

In antiquity, rituals were used to purify both spirit and body. With advances in technology and the refinement of marketing techniques in recent decades, the idea of purification has been revived in the form of “detoxification,” a concept that capitalizes on people’s fears related to pollution, unhealthy diets, and sedentary lifestyles.

I got acquainted with Ariel Roth as a writer, but I also got to meet him as a human being. I discovered neither fanaticism nor nervousness, neither doubt nor ideological speech in Roth, an octogenarian who still looks in detail at each new subject appearing on the agenda of the debate between evolution and creation. He maintains an unflagging desire for honesty and...

Carolynn Yakush inherited her taste for the good life from her Czech grandparents, and her interest in faith from her mother and the Christian schools she went to. For many years, the desire for money and a life of luxury overshadowed her spiritual and religious concerns. One day, almost without thinking about it, she entered a church again, and was amazed at the...

In the early 1900s, the average American farmer could produce enough food to feed a family of five. Today, an American farmer can feed his own family, and roughly another 100 people. Despite this, we are at risk of encountering the impossibility of feeding a growing population on a global scale. How has it come to this, and what should we do to...

“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).

I never cease to marvel at those who help, in an organized manner, troubled children, abandoned elderly or victims of violence. However, the general need for such heroic saviours reveals the failure of the social group that is apt to address these situations: the family.

Economic capitalism has a psychological twin, one that is not as bold and brash as its profit-obsessed counterpart, but if we look into the subtle details of our interior universe we find it hidden there.

Even in this secular age, the world’s largest group of religious believers—a full third of Earth’s human population—worships Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal God who appeared in human flesh. Millions more—Muslims, Baha’i, Hindus, Buddhists and others—recognise His unique connection to the Divine, His wisdom and His compassion.

How much do we know about love? Enough to understand that love is not an obligation—we cannot love by force, nor be loved in this way.

Dr Kendra Haloviak-Valentine, Professor of New Testament Studies at La Sierra University in Redlands, California, comes from a family with a tradition of theology and research.