Religion

In the most difficult moments of his life, Franz Hasel prayed: “Lord, if I am attacked, I will have no way to defend myself. I must trust in You to be my protector. My life is in Your hands.”

No leader has ever inspired mankind to a greater extent than the baby born in Bethlehem, the one who divided history. No other personality in the world has left such a mark on such a large number of fields as Jesus did. And the legacy He left in terms of human rights (especially women's rights), education, attitudes towards children, humility, and forgiveness is...

The nativity of Jesus gives meaning and hope to all the stories about us and the world in which we live. In the bundle of narratives that have ever been imagined and told, it remains "the most beautiful story in the world."

Much of the Bible was written by prophets, so it is full of prophetic revelation. Most of these revelations are about mysteries of the past and present that we would not otherwise have access to.

What I love most about Jesus is the deeply personal, highly individual way He relates to people around Him—the openness, genuine interest, and respect...

Virtually every civilization has been characterised by religious beliefs about the end of all things, not least about the timing and the conditions that precede the end, and signs of its imminence. There are many differences between these beliefs across civilisations, but many similarities too.

The New Testament would have looked quite different[1] without the influence of Athanasius the Great, bishop of Alexandria and church father of the Christian Church in the 4th century.

The controversial story of Baruch Spinoza takes on a fascinating dimension with the explosive excommunication from the Jewish community decreed by the leaders of the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam—a decision accompanied by one of the most severe anathemas. This document made Spinoza one of the most reviled philosophers by both Jews and Christians, but attitudes towards him began to change after the...

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.

I still remember it like it was yesterday: the brightness of the sun on my skin, the chill of the water, the crowds of cheering people. We had gathered that Saturday afternoon on the shores of Lake Jindabyne, a half-hour drive from Mount Kosciuszko, Australia’s tallest mountain.

Ultra-rich Silicon Valley tech magnate Bryan Johnson has been regularly having transfusions of his own son’s blood plasma in an effort to live longer. The treatments are expensive and are essentially still being trialled.

The end of the world has been an enduring human preoccupation and, paradoxically, has existed since the dawn of civilisation.

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.

Unlike all the great founders of religions, Jesus of Nazareth is unique in both life and death, and nature and character. Only superficial researchers can consider him to be just a popular sage, a great prophet, or a revolutionary moral genius. Jesus is different from everyone, even in His birth.

In Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century, hell is described as a "city of woe" and a place of "eternal pain"—metaphors of endless suffering.