Religion

I was twenty when I first became curious about God. I was fortunate to see His presence in the lives of my friends and longed for that same presence in my own life.

“God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21).

Pietism was a movement of spiritual revival that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries mainly in Germany and Bohemia.

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.”

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.

I was born and raised in a Seventh-day Adventist Christian family, so Jesus was a familiar presence in our home. Although it took me...

Of the hundreds of carols composed and sung at Christmas, one has managed not only to survive for more than two centuries, but also to spread its message of hope to all corners of the world.

Celsus was concerned about the spread of the new sect called Christianity. He felt that Christianity's view of the world and of life was so different from the ancient world order that, if accepted by the majority, it would ruin society. 

There’s something lying on a massive table. It’s a huge picture. You move closer and see that the design is made up of individual pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. But the pattern is unusual. It’s not an image you recognise, such as a Swiss mountain or a bouquet of tulips. As you focus on the details, you notice the pattern is constantly moving...

The Parable of the Sower appears to be the key to understanding all the other parables told by Jesus. It is neither mysterious nor cryptic; it simply provides a starting point. The apostles and all those who read the parable today are asked by Jesus Christ: "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?" (Mark 4:13). The logical conclusion...

On November 13, the Orthodox Church celebrates one of the most famous church fathers—John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, whose name is linked to the oldest and most widely used liturgy of the Eastern Church.

The effect or influence that a particular thing has on us depends largely on where that thing falls on the scale of our values. It's one thing to lose your folding fan in a foreign country and quite another to lose your passport.

Jessica was 19 when she had to tell her parents, both practicing Christians, that she was pregnant. That moment generated a real earthquake in the young woman’s family who, together with her boyfriend at the time, had been strongly involved in the purity movement, an ideology that promotes sexual abstinence until marriage, for religious reasons.

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,”...

In writing this article, I asked a handful of people what the worst thing they had ever received for Christmas was. The answers I received were interesting, to say the least.