Religion

During medieval times, eating eggs was forbidden during Lent (the 40 days before Easter). Any eggs laid were saved and decorated to celebrate on Easter Sunday. Apparently, everyone enjoyed tucking into their eggs, 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.

I found myself at the airport, waiting to board my flight. At one point, the speakers announced the names of four people who were expected at a nearby boarding gate. Their names were called three times. Eventually, the airport staff withdrew, and the door closed behind them. Shortly afterward, a modest-looking family appeared. The confusion in their eyes, as they glanced left and...

The first part of my life was marked by multiple barriers that placed me in a minority status.

I was in the park with my little girl when a heavy summer shower began, driving us home. My little girl wanted us to stop for a moment in the stairwell of our apartment building to watch the rain. After standing there for a few seconds, I heard her whisper, "God, You're getting soaked."

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

It’s hard to read the description of Jesus’ life in the Gospels and not wonder what the many supernatural healings and other miracles performed by Him mean for us today.

Right from the first centuries, the scenario of the second coming of Jesus was interpreted spiritually-allegorically by some, and politically-ecclesiastically by others. As we have learned from the previous article of this series, even the main millenarian movement in antiquity (Montanism) led to an anti-apocalyptic reaction on the part of moderate Christianity. Is this rejection of apocalyptic millenarianism justified? What does Revelation actually...

When we try to understand our fellow human beings, to grasp their thinking, the reasons behind their decisions, and the purpose of their actions, a familiar adage from popular wisdom comes to mind: “Put yourself in their shoes.”

A sense of meaninglessness—a void, a wilderness, a lack of direction—affects such a large number of people today that it has come to define the dominant mood of the society we live in and contribute to.

“All I can do is pray and hope.” With those words, I ended an article on infertility. After years of marriage and not one pregnancy, I did one of the only things I could do to help me process the fact that my wife and I might never have children: I wrote about it. 

My brother and I were thrashing through the bush en-route to a peak overlooking Airlie Beach in far North Queensland. A short hike that was only meant to be 800 metres seemed to go on forever. We stopped every person returning from the lookout to enquire about how much longer it would take for us to get there. “Oh just another 10 minutes,”...

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place...

"From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:26-27).

Let's go back in time to the day when Jesus spoke His apocalyptic words. At that time, rather than giving a revelation about the future, He was more concerned with warning about the dangers of deception.