Theology

Any sacrifice is hard to understand from the outside. But it's even harder to understand how sacrifice can be a choice that brings joy to the person making it. The easiest people to include in this category are, of course, mothers. For them, the sacrifices never seem too many or too hard. Even more amazing are those mothers who raise other people's unwanted...

“We need a bigger vision in prayer. We need God’s vision! Let’s keep praying and daring to ask for more—for God’s glory, that the gospel may go into all the world, into all nations, that Jesus may come!”

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."

This year marks the 58th anniversary of Time magazine's controversial cover question: Is God Dead?

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.

I was born into an Adventist family. This meant feeling that pretty much everything I knew, including my religious tradition, was the sole truth.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him" (Romans 8:28).

Some moments in life fade quickly, like ephemeral portraits in the memory's archive. Others, though we have never witnessed them, haunt us and force us to reconsider our perception of life, time, and our shadow self.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

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 He wrote a play, a novel, and even a cantata to try to re-create his memory of this event, each of which remained unpublished.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,...

The tendency toward the total privatization of religious life is particularly strong today, especially in the new generation.

“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them” (James 4:17). Yet Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?” This question highlights that good cannot be done just any way or against a person’s will. Jesus shows that human will must be respected before God’s power can address sickness.

“Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

I spent the end of high school in the Scandinavian school system. There, the teenager is confronted with the great questions of mankind in the context of social disciplines

Over the centuries, strong but artificial tensions have been created between the Gospel of Paul (proclaimed especially by Augustine and many Protestants) and the "legalism" of the biblical writers James, Peter, Jude, and so on, which Catholic and Orthodox theologians have usually defended. What is at stake in these tensions is the authority of God's commandments and thus the duty or obligation to...