Religion

Measuring more than nine metres tall, the pale granite carving of Dr King that is the centrepiece of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, just to the east of the National Mall in downtown Washington DC, makes it easy to forget that he was a relatively short man. His iconic likeness towers over visitors as his words carved into the stone walls around...

In a psalm that is worth reading on our coldest mornings and in our darkest nights, King David asked some rhetorical questions—“Whom shall I fear? Of whom shall I be afraid?”— questions which our contemporaries would not dare to answer.

It could be a perfunctory ritual, passed down through generations; a mechanically recited poem. But equally, the mealtime prayer can be a genuine spiritual exercise.

I was there, I saw him. He was coming towards me mechanically, impassively, coldly. He suddenly stopped in front of me and waited for me to speak. For a moment, I froze. He was tall, thin, his face oval and his eyes blue, slightly sunken under his eyelids. I had met such people before, but there was something special about him.

Even if there were a thousand people in a room with Pastor Jim Ayer, you wouldn't be able to miss him. He towered over most people by at least a head and always wore a black hat with a wide brim. I recognised him as the friendly host of a programme on Adventist World Radio, for which he travelled to the most unusual...

Was the Pax Romana really a time of peace?

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside. 

The imbalance between the requests and the thanksgiving we bring into our worship is a topic any Christian can talk about, and not just based on other people’s experience. As long as we approach praise and thanksgiving as duties to be fulfilled, we will miss the greatest blessings that can rest upon a heart full of gratitude.

“God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours—so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”[1](Corrie ten Boom)

Life is a stage that we enter without a script, although we are constantly influenced by forces of varying visibility: social, educational, religious, economic, and political.

In a society with a pragmatic mindset, any kind of belief is subject only to practical judgments. Effectiveness, usefulness, and utility are the basic criteria by which actions, deeds or beliefs are valued.

Some expectations dissolve into routine or turn into despair, while others invigorate life. The former are measured in deeds and desires, while the latter are measured in faithfulness and beliefs.

More than a century ago, when the social sciences were just beginning to study the relationship between religion and health, elite scholars such as sociologist Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche repudiated religion consonantly, claiming that it had a toxic effect on individuals. 

In those times when grief accompanies us and we find ourselves alone in the middle of the night, does God shed tears with us?

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.