Theology

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.

It could be a perfunctory ritual, passed down through generations; a mechanically recited poem. But equally, the mealtime prayer can be a genuine spiritual exercise.

Although we experience more positive than negative elements in life, we are still more intensely and more quickly affected by the unpleasant ones. How can we protect our joy of living despite the problems that beset us?

The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer. – F. B. Meyer

Pliny the Elder wrote, in Naturalis Historia, a well-known adage: "Among [mortals] the only certainty there is is that nothing is certain."[1] Few know that Pliny made this statement in a chapter on the gods.

British physicist and author Paul Davies predicts a future in which the need for spiritual guidance will be stronger than ever, but, at the same time, believes that “any religion that refuses to embrace scientific discovery is unlikely to survive to the 22nd century”.

I was in the park with my little girl when a heavy summer shower began, driving us home. My little girl wanted us to stop for a moment in the stairwell of our apartment building to watch the rain. After standing there for a few seconds, I heard her whisper, "God, You're getting soaked."

Jesus's words could not have been foreign to the Jewish people of His day. In an eminently oral culture, narratives, stories, parables and metaphors occupied an important place.

He was born in 1935 in Narvik, Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle, at a time when the clouds of war were gathering. In 1940, in the space of a few months, Narvik was controlled by Germany, conquered by the Allies, and then left to the Germans.

The Bible, a prophetic book par excellence, is often misinterpreted. Its prophecies can seem fatalistic, or fear-mongering. But, when understood correctly, Biblical prophecy more than unravels the future—it also provides us with a clearer perspective on the present.

If we take an honest look around us and within ourselves, we discover that the gulf between the mentality of those who choose prayer over medical treatment and the essence of the Christian mindset is not as deep as it seems. But it remains a gulf nonetheless.

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.

This article addresses the two often conflicting aspects of the parousia: its imminence and its delay.

As soon as the tourists leave the land of the silent agony of Gethsemane, their lives return to normal, and the garden where the Son of God sobbed in indescribable pain, misunderstood and unsupported even by His closest disciples, sinks back into oblivion.

The image of an apocalypse generated by a microscopic coronavirus has been sketched more than once by the press in the past few weeks.