Religion

When I was in my mid-twenties, I attended a university in Brisbane, Australia, two hours from where I lived. I had a friend in the city who I’d sometimes stay with to avoid having to travel back and forth on back-to-back uni days.

“I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me” (Habakkuk 2:1).

What image comes to mind when you hear the word success? A blue-suited CEO? Internet billionaire Mark Zuckerberg? Perhaps Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela? But if you’re like me, you probably didn’t think of a person living an unglamorous, day-to-day, ordinary life.

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...

Jesus had the highest regard for the Scriptures. The Gospels show that He was familiar with the content of the Scriptures, which He saw as the final authority for establishing truth, rejecting temptation, and choosing the way forward in the present and the future.

Edinburgh Castle sits proudly on the hill overlooking the city. Buildings and tourist shops crowd its feet, right up to the gate, where the square is being prepared for the famous Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Trust in God gives clarity to our thinking, so God asks us not to be obsessed with justice, but to be concerned with and delighted by grace.

From the speech of Jesus, who was a perfect speaker, we would expect there to be no fiery insults or harsh terms.

Sometimes we are so absorbed in our beautiful Christmas traditions that we don't even realize that our love for them makes them ugly.

Dr Denise Dunzweiller, of Walla Walla University in the north-west of the United States, has emerged as a passionate advocate of inclusive education, a technical term for education systems in which children with disabilities are educated alongside other children in mainstream schools, rather than in special classes.

Aurelius Augustine (354-430) is known for the stirring Christian experience he described in his Confessions and for the seminal theological thought that has shaped theology to this day.

Why couldn’t God simply have forgiven sinners? Precisely because sinners cannot be forgiven until they completely understand sin, with all its far reaching consequences, or before the wages of sin are paid.

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside. 

"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...

Putting Christmas on the myth-busting agenda is both an uncomfortable and challenging task—gratuitous sacrilege and pure paganism for those who believe that questioning Christmas is a sign of atheistic or conspiratorial leanings; honest, necessary Christian analysis for those interested in eliminating forgeries and freeing themselves from prejudice.