Theology

He married a pregnant woman and accepted the responsibility of raising and educating a Son who was, because of His divine power, his Father. This was a mission full of risks and challenges for a humble carpenter from Nazareth, who has come to attract the attention and respect of generations.

"Between 1800 and 1820 more than 20,000 people emigrated from Württemberg to Russia...hastening to meet the coming Lord and to find on Ararat in the Caucasus the place of refuge at the end of the world. Johann Albrecht Bengel had calculated that Christ would come again and that the Thousand Years' empire would dawn on Sunday, 18 June 1836. The 'brotherly emigration harmonies'...

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.

In a world dominated by artificiality and instant gratification, we are becoming masters at controlling our circumstances and environment.

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.

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Homer the Heretic,” Homer Simpson has a conversation with God.

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.

One can see today a growing concern among people who seek spirituality for relief, solutions and healing, both individually and collectively. It is an interest that arouses optimism about the role and impact that the Christian message can have on society, but also a concern for an accurate transmission of the biblical message.

This coronavirus crisis has, for me, some perplexing parallels with a well-known incident narrated in the Gospel of Matthew (14:22-33). The disciples are confined in a little boat in the middle of a terrible storm, almost as we are confined at home today by the emergency laws of our countries.

In a conversation with Dr. Shelly-Ann Bowen, we discussed her research on what determines whether someone will be active or passive in the face of catastrophic events—fires, floods, or a cancer diagnosis. Social injustice, a lack of self-awareness, and even an immature understanding of faith paralyse action. But there are ways to make positive changes.

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

For me, 2022 was the year of waiting—a word that managed to define our lives, thoughts and actions to an unexpected degree.

I talked to Pastor Nicu Butoi about the role that religion could play in treating depression and hopelessness, at the end of a series of evangelistic presentations he gave to a full-house before the pandemic.