Religion

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.

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

Does religion cause war? It’s a firm yes from British zoologist and vocal atheist Richard Dawkins, who sees a direct correlation between the two.

The tendency toward the total privatization of religious life is particularly strong today, especially in the new generation.

“Jerusalem crucified the Lord, Rome beheaded and crucified his chief apostles and plunged the whole Roman church into a baptism of blood. Rome became, for good and for evil, the Jerusalem of Christendom, and the Vatican hill the Golgotha of the West. The cross was substituted for the sword as the symbol of conquest and power” [1].

The end of the world has been an enduring human preoccupation and, paradoxically, has existed since the dawn of civilisation.

This article addresses the two often conflicting aspects of the parousia: its imminence and its delay.

His philosophy and theology dominated human thought for over a thousand years. Until Thomas Aquinas emerged in the 13th century, Augustine was undoubtedly the most important thinker of the medieval period.

What do you imagine heaven will be like? American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously said, “For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” Although I love Jesus, I think I am a bit afraid of getting bored there too. There’s a prevailing picture of heaven as being some sort of suspended animation, which may play into this.

Why personalising Christianity could threaten your salvation.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

It’s hard to read the description of Jesus’ life in the Gospels and not wonder what the many supernatural healings and other miracles performed by Him mean for us today.

One day, Jesus’s disciples—who followed Him about, observing His every word and action—asked Him to teach them how to pray.

In February 2008, English theologian NT Wright made headlines—at least on the website of Time magazine, among others—with comments associated with the launch of his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.

“We need a Bible like this,” said Reverend Richard Cizik, Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals in America, at the launch of the first Green Bible in 2010. Current environmental issues demand an ecological Bible, where passages about the quality of divine creation and care for nature entrusted to us by God are highlighted in green, Cizik says.