Category: Featured

If you’re a follower of Jesus Christ living in the twenty-first century, you can’t help but feel a similar sense of seismic activity underfoot. It’s not just that a few received opinions about God or humanity have changed.

Christian life is the experiential side of how we live as Christians. You might say Christian life is the dogmatic locus where one can discuss the experience of the Trinity. It’s the placeholder, the peg for that. And I’m not diving into the doctrine of the Trinity as such, but my exploration is geared towards making sense of the Christian life as a marriage to Christ.

It is remarkable what you can see if you just look up. From my humble patch of earth here on the North Shore of Boston, I can see the stars ablaze in the northeast night sky, with the belt of Orion hanging on the horizon, recognizable even to the most amateur astronomer.

“They’re real. But I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51.” With that offhand remark on a widely watched podcast, former president Barack Obama managed to ignite a familiar American firestorm: curiosity, skepticism, and a surge of online speculation about extraterrestrial life.

It would be useful to make clear that I’m not saying that I think that what we mean by angels is extraterrestrial life on some other planet. I wanted to respond to the misconception that Christian theology is incapable of thinking about life beyond Earth because it’s always been “about us.”

I am Iranian and a convert to Christianity from Islam. I offer my family’s testimony to demonstrate God’s mercy that brought us to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and to reflect on how Christians might extend that mercy to Muslims.

When a human being is on the threshold of death, something happens within the brain—and perhaps within consciousness itself—that neither science nor theology can fully explain.

The good news is God does not leave us alone to fight the demonic. God gives us his very self through the life of the church, the sacramental life of the church, and even the community itself. God does not want anyone to suffer alone.

The empty tomb is at the very heart of the Jesus story and the Christian faith. It is evidence that Jesus was no mere mortal and is the completion of Jesus’ death on the cross for human sin. Scripture teaches that without Jesus’ resurrection we are still in our sins. And a dead Jesus is hardly worth following in life.

Neither life nor death would have given contemporaries the impression that Jesus would impact world history. After all, Jesus was born of a poor young mother in a smelly barn and executed as a criminal. In between, he preached about the justice of God’s Kingdom in the barrios and the ghettos of Palestine. In the end, he was arrested when a paid informant singled him out.