Religion

To be a good Christian, they say, you must not swear, steal, lie, cheat or speak ill of anyone.

Whenever we acknowledge that our prayers have become a boring exercise rather than a real conversation with a real person, it’s time to explore creative, tried and tested methods to rebuild a meaningful, enthusiastic and transforming prayer life.

Concern for the planet's climate and its ecology has occupied the world's attention for many decades. In the 1980s, the ozone layer depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons and similar gases was observed, and in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was finalised.

In 2004, we experienced firsthand one of the most devastating tsunamis of our century. It was early morning, on Boxing Day.

In his desire to secure an heir to the throne, Henry VIII set off a domino effect that would ultimately change the face of America and the world.

"Hi, Alina! I hope you had a productive weekend" was the opening line of an email that, to me, encapsulated a whole misguided philosophy of life.

Ever since Thomas the Unbeliever, Christians have wanted to see with their own eyes what those who have been with Jesus at key moments of His mission saw.

The image of an apocalypse generated by a microscopic coronavirus has been sketched more than once by the press in the past few weeks.

Divorce, widowhood, or celibacy are just a few of the faces of loneliness, an experience which Christians also deal with at some point. Those who have often crossed paths with it, say that loneliness is truly a flowering wilderness: a place that is isolated but where deep spiritual lessons are learned.

Christians take their name from Jesus Christ. According to World Population Review, there are 2.38 billion Christian adherents across the globe. However, there is also a large portion of the world’s population who know little to nothing about Jesus. Research by Baxter in 2007 found that during that year, 30 million people would die without having heard about Jesus.

To nothing else is the name of God so often linked in our human discourse as to suffering and deliverance. This locus is a huge and complicated intersection of our existence.

The metaphor of the church as a hospital is so popular in the neo-Protestant milieu that it seems to highlight the hypocrisy of those attending church services even more. That’s what I used to believe until one day when I witnessed the opposite with my very own eyes.

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. 

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

"We cry out to the dry bones, 'Come alive! Come to life!' / We cry out to the dead hearts: 'Rise up! Come to life! Let us see an army rise from the ashes'". The song from which I extracted these verses is so rich in literary devices that, probably, if we randomly chose a person and had them listen to it, they...