Religion

In talking to pastor Cristian Modan, the religion teacher and chaplain at Mihai Ionescu School in Bucharest, I wanted to find out how we should teach children to communicate with God.

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.

“Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

My body felt like it was on fire, as if someone had pierced my skin with thousands of burning needles, and I could barely breathe. Fear had crept into my life some time ago, following me like a shadow that drained my soul and stole my precious moments of peace.

Our greatest, most desperate need today is not the type of change which loses its power over time, but that which leads to our transformation into a permanent Good.

There is a poignant poem by the young Nicolae Labiș, a profound thinker and visionary who tragically passed away at the age of 21, that warns of the danger of wasting one’s life.

At the appointed time in the plan of salvation, Christ was sent to us: "When the set time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law..." (Galatians 4:4).

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.

On June 23, 1863, in France, a book was published that would become the literary sensation of the century. Few could have foreseen the impact it would make. This was not a romance novel, thriller, or self-help guide; it was Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) by Ernest Renan. In less than four months, over 60,000 copies were circulating—a record-breaking success in...

If we take an honest look around us and within ourselves, we discover that the gulf between the mentality of those who choose prayer over medical treatment and the essence of the Christian mindset is not as deep as it seems. But it remains a gulf nonetheless.

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

This seemingly innocent question has probably caused more unrest in the last 2000 years than any other. It is, in fact, an echo of the concern of the ancient Jews to determine whether or not Israel was God's only people on earth. It also represents the echo of history that has witnessed wars born of the desire to legitimise a supreme deity.

In Europe, one in twenty people suffer from depression, and one in four will experience depression during their lifetime. In the United States, major depressive disorder affects about five percent of the population.

I grew up on the border between two different universes, not geographically but spiritually. There, across that fine line, lived more than half of my extended family, with a different worldview.

Sometimes, life is a succession of questions that God seems to ignore—until, at the right time, His silence provides an answer that is better than any answer in the world.