Religion

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 baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. – Matthew 3:11

The way we pray in public reveals what our secret prayers are truly like. Beyond mere words, it is our attitude and motivation that give meaning and substance to prayer.

Many people know the Lord’s Prayer, having learned it from a parent or grandparent. But few know that it was given as a response to the disciples’ request for Jesus to teach them how to pray.

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.

“‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it’” (Amos...

More than 300 bodies have been found in a Kenyan forest and at least 600 people are missing. The victims, including children, belonged to an apocalyptic cult that carried out a plan of mass suicide by starvation. The shock of the Shakahola massacre has reverberated beyond Kenya's borders, raising disturbing questions, including how the message of Revelation, part of the good news of...

In the spring of 2022, I interviewed the venerable professor of Hebrew exegesis, Jacques Doukhan, for the second time. Ten years before, in our first interview, we discussed his life: his beginnings in a Jewish family in Constantine, Algeria, his studies in France, Switzerland and the United States, his work as a teacher and author. This time we talked about the study that...

The unverified stories of children dying, due to severe emotional and sensorial deprivation, despite being fed and medically cared for, spread the theory that one can die because of lack of love, although being well taken care of. However, if we look more closely at the historical and personal human experience, we find that it is not necessarily the lack of love that...

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

Louis Braille said: "God was pleased to hold before my eyes the dazzling splendours of eternal hope. After that, doesn't it seem that nothing could keep me bound to the earth?"

In the opening scene of The Good Place, celestial being Michael (Ted Danson) explains that most world religions and philosophies get their respective understandings of the afterlife only about five per cent right.

If we were to make an assessment of today's Christianity, which kind of sacrifice would we notice more frequently—the kind offered by Cain or by Abel? Cain offered a sacrifice from the fruits of the earth, and Abel from the sheep of his flock. While Abel’s sacrifice was pleasing to God, Cain’s sacrifice was rejected. From the very beginning, God has expressed His...

In a society with a pragmatic mindset, any kind of belief is subject only to practical judgments. Effectiveness, usefulness, and utility are the basic criteria by which actions, deeds or beliefs are valued.

Religious people believe in the positive results of their faith in God. There is a common expectation that faithful people will lead good, healthy lives, while bad people will experience trouble, illness and punishments. The reality, however, is much more complex and often contradicts such expectations. How useful is religious faith when it comes to health, or the healing of the sick?