Theology

In the heart of the most powerful man in Judea, a greater fear than any other was born: the fear of losing control. Herod's story could be our story.

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.

Any religion’s popularity depends on the rewards it promises. While people are interested in the immediate benefits of this life, they are mostly interested in the future, the hope their religion brings, and how solid it is.

Right from the first centuries, the scenario of the second coming of Jesus was interpreted spiritually-allegorically by some, and politically-ecclesiastically by others. As we have learned from the previous article of this series, even the main millenarian movement in antiquity (Montanism) led to an anti-apocalyptic reaction on the part of moderate Christianity. Is this rejection of apocalyptic millenarianism justified? What does Revelation actually...

Choir rehearsal had begun only five minutes earlier, but I was already restless. Using a convenient excuse, I slipped out quietly, thinking about the crooked piece of rebar I had hidden a week before. It was exactly what I needed to force open the lock on the door without a handle, deliberately left that way so no one could enter the construction site...

Between 2008 and 2021, 379 people died in selfie-related accidents. Made habitual by consumerism and social media, this cult of self-promotion is part of a nefarious cycle of narcissistic stimulation and a powerful indicator of our longing for worth and, by extension, meaning.

Dr Kendra Haloviak-Valentine, Professor of New Testament Studies at La Sierra University in Redlands, California, comes from a family with a tradition of theology and research.

After covering the historical evolution of the Christian teaching about the return of Jesus Christ in the first three articles, in the fourth article, which precedes the one that you’re reading now, I made a minimal review of some philosophical, political, religious, and esoteric currents that are important to understand the world in which the millenarian revivals of the 19th century emerged.

On a number of occasions during his writing life, Nobel Prize winner and author Elie Wiesel tried to re-tell the story of a profound experience he’d had as a young boy in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He wrote a play, a novel, and even a cantata to try to re-create his memory of this event, each of which remained unpublished. Finally,...

Sometimes, life is a succession of questions that God seems to ignore—until, at the right time, His silence provides an answer that is better than any answer in the world.

When all we have left is God and He remains silent, we need a faith that endures, even when our resources are depleted and we feel as though we have been forgotten.

Who was Jesus really? While His historical existence is no longer questioned, many people believe that He was at best an exceptional personality of His time, a reformer whom His disciples later transformed into a deity. Why is neo-atheism concerned with promoting such a Jesus, and why is He nothing more than a new form of doubt?

The Unitarian Movement was defined as a significant minority movement under the influence of Humanism. The name “Unitarians” comes from the belief in one divine Person, a belief also common to Judaism and Islam, as opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity.

On April 26th 1986, reactor 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded. The effects were catastrophic­­—it was the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion let out the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs-worth of radiation, and the area around Chernobyl—including the town of Pripyat—is now uninhabited. It will be unsafe to live there for the next 20,000 years.

Without ever looking for doubt I often welcomed it with interest and gratitude. I did not run away from it, nor did I treat it with indifference. I rather sought to tone it down.