Religion

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.

Even if there were a thousand people in a room with Pastor Jim Ayer, you wouldn't be able to miss him. He towered over most people by at least a head and always wore a black hat with a wide brim. I recognised him as the friendly host of a programme on Adventist World Radio, for which he travelled to the most unusual...

The effect or influence that a particular thing has on us depends largely on where that thing falls on the scale of our values. It's one thing to lose your folding fan in a foreign country and quite another to lose your passport.

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.

The world of the homeless is the darker side of our world. It is inhabited by vagrants, drug addicts, and the powerless. This world has its own rules, customs, pleasures, and pains, but lacks meaning and peace. And those who enter this world struggle to leave it.

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?

Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about our future? This is a question even specialists are concerned with, and it cannot be answered easily. It is difficult to predict what the future holds.

Could we have a quality Christian ministry without an authentic relationship with God? Anyone can pretend in the short term, but to truly succeed in the long term you need a devotional life full of passion and a continual closeness to Jesus Christ.

"We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid." (Christopher Hitchens) 

I spent the end of high school in the Scandinavian school system. There, the teenager is confronted with the great questions of mankind in the context of social disciplines

The name of Jesus brings to mind the gift of the incarnate Godhead—their supernatural acts, astonishing wisdom, incomparable goodness, unmitigated innocence, supreme sacrifice, offered salvation, and our only certain hope.

An administrative decision by a Catholic university in the United States is a good illustration of a major reason why Christian churches, with some exceptions, are rapidly losing their relevance in society.

"On the 5th of March 1986, life left me! I was in the process of moving and that evening I felt terribly tired and cold..." (Ruth Frikart-Moor)

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. 

One reason, if not the reason why the story of humanity's first wrong choice, the original failure, is vehemently denounced is the brutality with which this event—a seemingly trivial "dietary" decision that turned out to be the most costly ever made by a human being—reminds us more powerfully than any other story how painful the consequences of our mistakes can be. We do...