Religion

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

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.

What do you think of when you hear the word church? Perhaps your mind conjures up images of ancient cathedrals, resplendent with gothic spires, stained glass windows, and vaulted ceilings.

On April 26th 1986, reactor 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded. The effects were catastrophic­­—it was the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion let out the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs-worth of radiation, and the area around Chernobyl—including the town of Pripyat—is now uninhabited. It will be unsafe to live there for the next 20,000 years.

If God exists, why would I matter to Him?

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?"

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.

Sometimes we are so absorbed in our beautiful Christmas traditions that we don't even realize that our love for them makes them ugly.

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.

Why couldn’t God simply have forgiven sinners? Precisely because sinners cannot be forgiven until they completely understand sin, with all its far reaching consequences, or before the wages of sin are paid.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to tour south Te Waipounamu (the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand). Flying first into Invercargill, I made my way north, excitedly anticipating iconic tourist spots such as Queenstown, Milford Sound, Wanaka and more. However, on the way, the sleepy town of Te Anau caught me by surprise, captivating me in a way that I didn’t...

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

Many doomsayers have “cried wolf” when it comes to the end of the world. Does that mean it’s not going to happen at all?

In our desperate search for miraculous answers or confirmations, we often forget that the most profound miracles are hidden in the seemingly mundane details of our lives.

After Jesus was born—that is, in the era we call Anno Domini (AD)—the history of mankind was different from that of Christianity. As it is known, the latter was not the history of a triumphant march of Christianity towards its universalization and the unification of the human race. On the contrary, this history can rather be characterised as a manifestation of “the great...