Religion

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. – C.S. Lewis

Dr Kendra Haloviak-Valentine, Professor of New Testament at La Sierra University in Redlands, California, comes from a family with a tradition of theology and research.

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.

According to the international standard ISO 8601, Sunday is the seventh day of the week. However, many countries, including the US, Canada, and Japan, consider Sunday as the first day. Where does this contradiction come from and why does it matter if Sunday is the first or the seventh day of the week?

As strange as this question may seem, it is also difficult and has consequences that are not at all negligible. Even if it is not always phrased like this, or perhaps not even spoken out loud, this question arises in every home.

In ancient Israel, the high priests wore a vest that had two stones on it called the Urim and Thummim. Whenever a question about God’s will was brought to the priest, he would ask God to give the answer. If the stone on the left glowed, it indicated divine approval. If the stone on the right glowed instead, it indicated God’s disapproval.

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

Trust in God gives clarity to our thinking, so God asks us not to be obsessed with justice, but to be concerned with and delighted by grace.

"Is it not too sadly true that we can recollect anything but Christ, and forget nothing so easy as Him whom we ought to remember?"—Charles Spurgeon

The nativity of Jesus gives meaning and hope to all the stories about us and the world in which we live. In the bundle of narratives that have ever been imagined and told, it remains "the most beautiful story in the world."

“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.

I am visiting two sick people who share the same terminal illness. Their suffering is increased by the fact that they are brothers and that a mother’s broken heart lies at the core of it all. One of them is a businessman. The other, a servant of the altar. Their mother’s greatest frustration is that her wish to take some of the suffering...

Whether you're a practising believer, a casual believer or, conversely, an atheist, you cannot help but be taken aback by the fact that one of the earliest images of God we have in Scripture is an unexpected one for those times: the image of God writing (Exodus 31:18).

I was born into an Adventist family. This meant feeling that pretty much everything I knew, including my religious tradition, was the sole truth.

The Carolingian Renaissance must be understood as a "reform and reconfiguration of all peoples under the reign of Charles, with a view to creating a Christian territory in its institutional structures, moral conduct, and personal convictions."