Religion

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?"

Noemina is a graduate of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, where she majored in health care. She is working in her field as of 2012. The journal excerpt she sent to us reflects her week-long experience at the epicentre of the battle with the new coronavirus in the intensive care unit, where serious cases are admitted.

“All I can do is pray and hope.” With those words, I ended an article on infertility. After years of marriage and not one pregnancy, I did one of the only things I could do to help me process the fact that my wife and I might never have children: I wrote about it. 

Two strangers walk hurriedly through the busy streets of Constantinople. The great bells are quietly ringing out the call to mass, while the semantrons are hastening the footsteps of the faithful towards the place of worship. St Sophia's Cathedral stands majestically, its gates wide open, awaiting pilgrims seeking salvation.

I’m going to be honest with you. I find prayer really hard. If I had to give reasons for all my tears over the past few years, most of them have come during conversations with God.

"Hi, Alina! I hope you had a productive weekend" was the opening line of an email that, to me, encapsulated a whole misguided philosophy of life.

“It was as if I were living in a fairy tale. And the most wonderful part was that I knew—hard as it may be to believe—that the story was true. None of the hardships of imprisonment touched me. The fear of the unknown no longer unsettled me, nor did the fact that, three days after my arrest, no one had yet called me...

I thought to myself: Is there an alarm or is it an end of day signal?

I have always been fascinated by God. And yet, I believe I could have known Him far better—much more deeply—if only I had better understood what He sought to teach me each day, including through my neighbour.

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.

In the first three articles in this series, we examined what Scripture says about the coming of Jesus, and also how the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation remain the foundations of understanding time.

The idea of hell takes up a dark corner in most of our minds, whether we think about it or not.

Influenced by the Calvinist Presbyterian John Witherspoon, James Madison, an Anglican, collaborated with Virginia's persecuted Baptists to establish the concept of religious freedom and freedom of conscience that changed America and the world forever.

Sinking into darkness, after 14 years of enjoying all the spectacles of grace and beauty in which our world is enveloped, can be the beginning of tragedy. Or it can be the moment when you begin to discern, nuance by nuance, the splendour of a reality that healthy eyes so often miss.

While the historic churches remained at least disinterested in millenarianism, the Apocalypse, and the Parousia—that is to say, when they were not hostile to them—Protestant pluralism allowed for both reluctance[1] and increasingly significant preoccupations with the research and publication of the themes regarding the end of the world.