Religion

"I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me" (Proverbs 8:17).

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.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the threat of the Ottoman Empire to Eastern Europe was a painful certainty. The last Byzantines, aware of the ensuing disaster, called on Western aid, seeking political union with the Roman Catholic Church.

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

For those who accept the biblical account of Jesus's life as true, the most important thing is deciding how to respond to the Savior’s act of offering His life. What does it mean to accept Jesus's sacrifice? How does it apply to us? How does it become part of our lives?

My body felt like it was on fire, as if someone had pierced my skin with thousands of burning needles, and I could barely breathe. Fear had crept into my life some time ago, following me like a shadow that drained my soul and stole my precious moments of peace.

Undoubtedly, the best known of all Bible verses is John 3:16, but even this does not sound the same in its different renderings. One of these is a personalised version, sometimes employed in church settings: “For God so loved [insert your name here] that He gave His one and only Son, so that if [insert your name here] believes in Him, [insert your...

They say that "all roads lead to Rome". This famous saying originated in ancient times with the extensive network of roads built by the Romans to facilitate communication and travel throughout their empire.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place...

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.

The holidays are a time of generosity, when those forgotten by the world meet those who want to forget that sadness exists and, out of the coexistence of the two needs, something good is born.

Judging by the headlines in the press over the last weeks, the world seems ready to have a discussion about sin.

On the basis of ancient, hidden non-canonical gospels, some commercial and half-learned scholars propagate sensational discoveries, which are in fact both old and novel speculations arising from the Bible’s silence on some aspects of Jesus’s life.

Sometimes, I wonder what I would be like if I were more like Jesus. Above all, I wonder how He would act in my situation. I have to admit that these questions sometimes leave me feeling lost.

Hendel Butoy was born in Brazil and raised in southern California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and was then offered a position as an animator at Walt Disney in 1979.