Religion

In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures – Psalm 104:24

I talked to Pastor Nicu Butoi about the role that religion could play in treating depression and hopelessness, at the end of a series of evangelistic presentations he gave to a full-house before the pandemic.

When I read how a non-religious mother felt she needed to calm herself down at the thought that her child might begin to believe in God, I was surprised and almost offended.

What are the most common causes of failure to change? For clarity and efficiency of argumentation, we will restrict the definition of change to those transformations that affect living and working habits. Most often, habits stand in the way of success and performance.

“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

Without ever looking for doubt I often welcomed it with interest and gratitude. I did not run away from it, nor did I treat it with indifference. I rather sought to tone it down.

For the chained man, there were now only two options: unreserved submission to the council or condemnation; recantation or death. Outside, the stake was already prepared.

I was a pagan as a child. Not by choice, but as a consequence of lacking any access to the Word of God. In the 1980s Romania, catechizing an Orthodox child (whose parents were members of the Communist Party) was a highly unlikely event Pavlik Morozov’s myth, the hero-child that denounced his own father, generated caution.

Recently, my wife and I got hooked on a TV show. We’d wait in anticipation for the latest episode each week. The show was Old people’s home for 4-year-olds. The basic premise? Take a class of cheeky, energetic, curious four-year-olds (some of who lacked a filter) and have them spend a significant amount of time with the elderly residents of an aged-care facility.

It is said that God works through people. I am convinced that the people evoked in connection with my stellar moments—and I really would have liked to name them all—each contributed, in their own way, to my reunion with Divinity.

While Santa Claus, his reindeer, and the various stories that add to the magic of the holidays easily capture children's imaginations, we may find that introducing them to the true story of the birth of Jesus is more difficult—or at least that it's not as easy to present a true story in as attractive a package as the fiction has been wrapped in.

There has been a lot of speculation in the online environment about COVID-19 and the end of the world, but the connection between the two is more subtle than it first appears. It has been suggested that the pandemic is only the tip of the iceberg, that it is one of the seven last plagues of Revelation, or that it is the fourth...

I like to look back. When I am climbing a mountain, it is an excuse to rest. But I also do it for another reason—to see how far I have climbed.

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.

Conflict is everywhere: in our books, movies, TV shows. But every conflict is a mere shadow of the controversy that the entire world is embroiled in.