Gospel

For centuries, the sacrifice of God the Son and the divine plan for man’s salvation have generated several dilemmas and raised more questions than we could imagine. And the answers that have been found have revealed more implications of the cross than we used to believe, whether we are Christians or non-Christians, believers or skeptics.

Plato may have been one of the first to think this way, but in modern sociology it was Walter Lippmann who made history with the idea that people do not have access to reality in all its complexity, but operate on images of that reality that they construct for themselves.

When we are isolated with our family, problems that are sometimes easy to ignore become more acute, and the need to receive and offer forgiveness to those around us becomes increasingly evident.

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war — not missiles but microbes. We are not ready for the next epidemic” – these were the words Bill Gates said at the beginning of his speech at TED Talk conference on April 3, 2015.

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

Why personalising Christianity could threaten your salvation.

Some Christians venerate the Virgin Mary, multiplying her attributes and exaggerating her qualities to the point of deification. Other Christians go to the opposite extreme and trivialise Mary's personality and contribution, barely recognising her basic qualities.

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

As we know all too well, life can be hard. Even in the best of times, life can be hard. But now this, a pandemic? How are we to cope?

No one has ever seen God, but the One who knew Him before He was born on this earth taught us all to address Him in prayer.

God uses the traits we dislike as well as our weaknesses to create something great, beyond our abilities and imagination. This is the message that pervades the pages of "The Woman with the Book", the biography of the missionary Gladys Aylward.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. – John 14:27

The stakes are high when it comes to identifying the one to whom we should pray, and we can discover who by answering an apparently simple question: Can we expect prayers to be heard no matter who we address them to?

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

“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...