Judge and jury
I once served on a jury and, to my surprise, was voted foreman. The accused was charged with manslaughter, a serious crime with quite a harsh penalty; while driving an aged-care minivan filled with pensioners, he’d hit and killed a pedestrian. The defendant was a facility volunteer who had been taking a group of pensioners shopping. His vehicle collided with the deceased in...
The Baptist Church
The Baptist Church has made significant contributions to religious life by embracing the principle of separation of church and state and the principle of religious freedom.
Divine inspiration | God’s breath upon the prophets
What is “divine inspiration?” How does it happen?
The monk who made the modern world
Why Western thought—and your own beliefs—owe a debt to one German monk.
Did the Church halt the progress of surgery?
An urban legend claims that the Church vehemently opposed the dissection of corpses through medieval decrees of prohibition or limitation of this practice.
How to grow together with God
We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.
Is there life after death?
As a media and communications graduate, I love stories in all their forms, but I’ve always held a special place in my heart for science fiction. Exotic planets, alien races, unique extrapolations of scientific theory and bizarre visions of the future of our world—no other genre captures my imagination in quite the same way.
In praise of the ordinary
What image comes to mind when you hear the word success? A blue-suited CEO? Internet billionaire Mark Zuckerberg? Perhaps Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela? But if you’re like me, you probably didn’t think of a person living an unglamorous, day-to-day, ordinary life.
The courage of freedom
“It was as if I were living in a fairy tale. And the most wonderful part was that I knew—hard as it may be to believe—that the story was true. None of the hardships of imprisonment touched me. The fear of the unknown no longer unsettled me, nor did the fact that, three days after my arrest, no one had yet called me...
The teachings of John Calvin | Calvinism
In 2017, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the French publication La Reforme conducted a survey to find out what people knew about two famous personalities of Protestantism: the German Luther and the Frenchman Calvin. To the amazement of the initiators, the study showed that Luther’s name was much more familiar to the French than that of their compatriot,...
The accuracy of biblical manuscripts
What guarantees do we have that the texts from which modern translations of the Bible were made reflect the original?
God on trial
The scenario in which God is a judge and His creatures are subject to His judgment culminates, in the Bible, with a happy ending for all lovers of righteousness. But what would be the end of a situation in which God is the accused in a trial instituted by His creatures? Whose ending would be happy?
The risen Jesus
Was the death of Jesus the end of an extraordinary life, or just the beginning of eternal life for those who believe in Him?
On the banks of a river where no one had ever been
Jim Elliot was 25 years old when he headed to Ecuador as a result of the answer he sought from God regarding his future.