Religion

Less than 50 years after the supporters of Martin Luther’s ideas in Germany were mockingly called “Lutherans,” England was in its turn discovering a derogative nickname—“Puritans”—which it applied to a category of Christians who disturbed the ordinary life of the English church and society.[1]

Broken blade. Shaking hands. Clouded mind. “I could have killed him.”

The word sacrifice is not really a pleasant word. When you hear it, you may think of weird archaic rituals involving blood and animals. You may think of giving up something you love or like to save money or to save your waistline. Sacrifice is not a word we use often, and it’s often used with negative associations. But in a strange twist, the action...

The birth of Jesus Christ is one of the most significant events in human history. Celebrated at Christmas, by some with emotion, by others with indifference, most of the time the holiday loses sight of the main Character. Religious meanings remain in the shadows, while commercial dimensions are pursued at all costs.

For the crowds gathered around the casket containing the relics of Saint Paraskeva, everything is just dream and faith. Amazingly much faith. There is also something else. There is the hope of a miracle, a miracle that will cure diseases, cover debts, and make life happy.

The controversial story of Baruch Spinoza takes on a fascinating dimension with the explosive excommunication from the Jewish community decreed by the leaders of the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam—a decision accompanied by one of the most severe anathemas. This document made Spinoza one of the most reviled philosophers by both Jews and Christians, but attitudes towards him began to change after the...

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17).

Any sacrifice is hard to understand from the outside. But it's even harder to understand how sacrifice can be a choice that brings joy to the person making it. The easiest people to include in this category are, of course, mothers. For them, the sacrifices never seem too many or too hard. Even more amazing are those mothers who raise other people's unwanted...

Born in Canada, in 1935, Don Richardson was a missionary who fervently carried on the Renaissance spirit of the great missionaries. Having studied at the Prairie Bible Institute and the (Wycliffe) Summer Institute of Linguistics, together with his wife, he worked as a missionary among the Sawi of Papua New Guinea for 15 years, and translated the Bible into their language. His books,...

Pietism was a movement of spiritual revival that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries mainly in Germany and Bohemia.

An ordinary wooden chair is a metaphor that’s often used to talk about the key dynamics of faith. But it’s worth exploring further. Perhaps we could describe this as a process of developing the theory of a chair.

In the face of the hundreds of Christian confessions that exist today, the ecumenical efforts of the last decades have invariably raised some complementary and equally legitimate questions: Is Jesus' desire "that all of them may be one" (John 17:21) possible?

Daniel chapter 9 contains what many consider to be the most sublime prophecy of the Old Testament—a prophecy of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Amazingly, not only did this prophecy reveal the purpose of His incarnation as a child, but it also specified when His ministry would begin and when He would die.

We are generally surrounded by people close to us—family, friends, or colleagues. We build a kind of microcosm in which we stand at the center, alongside the relationships we choose to maintain. But on that particular day, I was reminded that everyone has their own microcosm.

While the historic churches remained at least disinterested in millenarianism, the Apocalypse, and the Parousia—that is to say, when they were not hostile to them—Protestant pluralism allowed for both reluctance[1] and increasingly significant preoccupations with the research and publication of the themes regarding the end of the world.