Religion

There are three main qualifications I have as an amateur Road to Bethlehem actor: I am tall, I am prepared to wear a funny hat in public and I have committed to making myself available to do it each year for a week in December over the past 10 years.

I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe was hit hard by several disasters, the proportions of which are difficult to imagine today.

Although they are constantly improving their preparedness for crises and disasters, modern societies find themselves powerless in the face of a growing threat: transnational crises.

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

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

Regardless of what is said about the predictive nature of the words traditionally attributed to Malraux—"The 21st century will be religious or it will not be"—the truth is that almost two decades of this century have passed, and we don't really know where we are going.

As strange as this question may seem, it is also difficult and has consequences that are not at all negligible. Even if it is not always phrased like this, or perhaps not even spoken out loud, this question arises in every home.

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.

At the end of every year, a covert censorship obscures the true meaning of the event that split history in two: the birth of Jesus. Under the festive guise of Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ has been culturally transformed into a holiday of good cheer. The religious motif has been preserved, but the spiritual meaning has largely been lost.

It is not something that is written in any rules or printed on posters. However, you can see it in the way people greet each other and share their ideas, as well as in the sense of belonging they experience when they participate in church activities. The organisational culture of the church can be a source of unity, or conversely an invisible obstacle...

The sermons. My mother’s stories. The little sand table and Sabbath School for children. Adults’ conversations about religion. All the information I absorbed in childhood helped me sketch an image of Jesus with one major flaw: it was rendered in far too many shades of grey.

No one has ever seen God, but the One who knew Him before He was born on this earth taught us all to address Him in prayer.