Features

Bruce Mullan takes a quick look at how Jesus can be found on the World Wide Web. A Google search for the word “Jesus” produces a not-so-surprising 205 million results for the character described by Wikipedia as “The central figure of Christianity… much revered by most Christian churches as the Son of God and the incarnation of God”. But what ...

Barrack Obama attended prayers before he became the 44th president of the United States at a ceremony seen to spotlight the complexities of U.S. religious pluralism and the relationship of the United States with the rest of the world. Obama and his wife Michelle were accompanied to St John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, by ...

He makes his own clothes, has long dreadlocks and looks for all the world like a 1970s hippy drop-out, but he’s been on a stage near you talking with Uniting Church young people and firing them up with some very radical ideas. Shane Claiborne looks, speaks, and dresses like an Old Testament prophet or John the Baptist, and he makes ...

They are iconic images: a Salvation Army volunteer ringing a bell or a brass band playing familiar tunes by a large pot, inviting passers-by to fill the kettle with donations to help the poor. But the venerable institution has taken on a modern twist by embracing technology. The Salvation Army – or Sally Ann, as it is commonly known in ...

Shaken by the global financial crisis we are confronted with a new truth. We have too easily trusted that the financial markets would secure our way of life and provide for our futures. This trust was seriously misplaced, and many of us are now feeling insecure and asking, “Where does our hope come from?” Some have received money from the ...

Toronto, 17 December (ENI) At a time of year when people will fight with each other for the latest toy for their children, and after the trampling death of a store worker in the United States by shoppers who had queued overnight for post-Thanksgiving holiday sales, parents need help to break free of the consumer culture, says the author of ...

Some are addressed to "Jesus", "All inclusive Chris,", "The Temple of Abraham", "Holy Mary", or the "City of God", but most of the letters which end up in the Israeli Postal Service’s Dead Letter Department simply bear the word "God". No one really knows how the tradition started of sending letters addressed to God from this little postal service office ...

Africa largest Christian grouping, the All Africa Conference of Churches, has pledged to "pray for an end to illegitimate rule in Zimbabwe" after debating and toning down a statement about the country on the doorstep of Mozambique, where they have been meeting. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe "is using power-sharing negotiations as a strategy for wasting time and exercising continued control" over ...

Patriarch Alexei II of the Russian Orthodox Church, who died on 5 December at the age of 79, will go down in history as the cleric who presided over Russia’s "second baptism" – the post-communist era which saw the liberation of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the restoration of battered church buildings and, even more important, of the ...

A two-year international study of youth and spirituality reveals respondents view spirituality as an important part of their lives, and most of them rarely talk to others about it, but wish they could. "In most countries where surveys were conducted, an average of only 7 percent of youth said they didn’t believe life has a spiritual dimension or they didn’t ...