Religion

There were once two friends. One day, one of them went to the other, with a heavy heart, less than desirable thoughts in his head, and a bevy of bad behaviours. He really wanted to change them. He wanted to get better.

Dr Kendra Haloviak-Valentine, Professor of New Testament at La Sierra University in Redlands, California, comes from a family with a tradition of theology and research.

Pray! If not to God, then to a god. Admit that we are defeated, because this is the first step towards victory.

Imagine the conversation between God and Adam after Adam had sinned, seen himself naked for the first time (in more ways than one) and hidden from God. To the piercing question, "Why did you hide?" Adam replied, "Because I was naked". Reading between the lines, we detect the subtext: "I hid myself, for one cannot come naked before God."

I’m walking along a remote beach in Hermanus, South Africa. There’s not a single other footprint in the sand. I take off my shoes and let my feet sink deep into the warm, fine powder. Bliss. My friend, a local who drove me here, takes one look at my face and asks with undeniable pride, “What do you think?” But I can’t answer....

In the face of the hundreds of Christian confessions that exist today, the ecumenical efforts of the last decades have invariably raised some complementary and equally legitimate questions: Is Jesus' desire "that all of them may be one" (John 17:21) possible?

The dialectical spirit of ecumenism gives rise, among other things, to a question whose full answer is still awaited: How is it that the critical spirit and rationalism of Enlightenment origin, combined with making the Bible available to ordinary people, has led to so many schisms?

Jesus' principles can still shape a sincere discourse even though many centuries have passed since the moment they were displayed in His life.

Although we experience more positive than negative elements in life, we are still more intensely and more quickly affected by the unpleasant ones. How can we protect our joy of living despite the problems that beset us?

Renee James was 18 when she decided to stop praying. If God was going to be silent, she thought, she would be silent too. She had been praying for years for the healing of her brothers, Sean and Niall, one suffering from autism and the other from Down syndrome. Yet there had been no answer.

While Santa Claus, his reindeer, and the various stories that add to the magic of the holidays easily capture children's imaginations, we may find that introducing them to the true story of the birth of Jesus is more difficult—or at least that it's not as easy to present a true story in as attractive a package as the fiction has been wrapped in.

“Soul” is a very special term. Due to lack of space, I shall not approach it here philosophically or scientifically, but exclusively in the context of biblical theology, narrowing it even further, to a linguistic point of view.

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.

The Anabaptist creed emphasised the premise that Bible truth was accessible even to secular readers and listeners, who had a rudimentary education.

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.