The faith in our hearts

When I read “The Pitesti Phenomenon”, in my teens, I was bewildered by how cruel human nature can be. It was also then that I realized that being forced to renounce yourself, to bury your values and defining beliefs to become the reflection of a rotten system, to become inhuman is worse than being physically tortured.

How (not) to clip the wings of reformation

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe was hit hard by several disasters, the proportions of which are difficult to imagine today.

Excellence and modesty | An interview with Dr Bert B. Beach

His name is Bert B. Beach. Until his retirement in July 1995, he was director of the Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Department (PARL) of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Good Place: great questions, medium answers

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.

Into the wilderness with God

This year marks the 58th anniversary of Time magazine's controversial cover question: Is God Dead?

The great astonishment

I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

Where do we get the Light from?

Let the one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on their God. – Isaiah 50:10

Return to meaning

"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?

Pocket apocalypse: The end of the world in the press

The image of an apocalypse generated by a microscopic coronavirus has been sketched more than once by the press in the past few weeks.

How do I learn to really enjoy life?

I don’t remember much about the moment. I remember its warmth, and the way it glowed with purpose and spirit. But the stage is blurry. The song which pulsed out from it is uncertain. I know it came from a good friend of mine, one whose spot-lit glory provoked in me no jealousy, no feeling of being left out.

For the love of singing

Since she stepped onto the stage in the 1987 Australia Day concert with Ricky May at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre as a 15-year-old, Silvie Paladino has established herself as one of Australia’s most versatile and talented entertainers.

The One who couldn’t live knowing that I was dying

Love stories have the ability to captivate us with the details of an undying beauty, to overshadow the uncertainties about their permanence, to introduce through the front door the hope that one day we will live such a story, which will bear the signature of eternity.

The death of Death: Easter and eternal life

Ultra-rich Silicon Valley tech magnate Bryan Johnson has been regularly having transfusions of his own son’s blood plasma in an effort to live longer. The treatments are expensive and are essentially still being trialled.

I am not a sinner

I grew up in a small town called Utsunomiya, three hours away from Tokyo. When I was a child, I was certain that there was a God and that He loved me. Then I grew up and began to wonder, “If there is a good God, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why do innocent children die? Why is the...

The upside of religion getting marginalised

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.