When the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, proposed a ban on the burqa and niqab at a conference of her political party in December 2016, she was following the lead of a number of countries in Europe which already have such legislation in place
A recent survey of the religious profile of the 115th Congress revealed that despite the increase in the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation, members of Congress are overwhelmingly religious, with only one member identifying as having no religion.
- By Joan Cerio
Love enters and exits our physical body through the sacred coordinate within our heart. It permeates every organ, cell, and atom but it does not call any one of these its home within the body. Not even the heart can contain the enormity of love: It merely translates the language of love.
Signs left by the angels are meant to help stir and awaken our intuitive nature so that we can expand our conscious connection and deepen our relationship with a higher power. The power is not within the sign itself; the power is within the message that the sign reveals...
Picturesque and exotic, with their crowns and camels, the three kings regularly appear on Christmas cards and in nativity scenes.
Many people are familiar with the stories in the New Testament gospels of Luke and Matthew about Jesus’ conception and birth.
Every Christmas season, the now typical jokes pile up on social media. Jesus is commended for having a “stable upbringing”. But all this facetious word play prompts me to think a little more seriously about the language used in traditional accounts of the nativity.
Bright stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world. The faithful sing about the “Star of Wonder” that guided the wise men to a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.
Christmas is literally “the mass for Christ”, the day on which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. The western date for Jesus’ birth is quite arbitrary. It was chosen by Pope Leo I, bishop of Rome...
On Wednesday, Dec. 21, nations in the Northern Hemisphere will mark the winter solstice – the shortest day and longest night of the year.
Evangelicals are more skeptical of evolution than of climate change, according to new research.
How to be happy? When speaking of relationships, the safest thing to relate to is always Buddha. We can address every being we meet — not only human beings but also animals — as essentially Buddha. In Western terms, we speak of being in the presence of God or meeting God all the time.
The Roman Catholic Church will allow priests all over the world to grant forgiveness for abortion. This announcement came from Pope Francis at the end of the Jubilee of Mercy – a holy year dedicated to forgiveness.
I believe that we are all born with a powerful shamanic spirit. Like the rest of the natural world that we are so deeply related to, we are given many wonderful shamanic gifts from our divine source.
Since the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has been largely identified with right-wing politics. Conservative religious values entered the political sphere through movements such as Moral Majority and Focus on the Family that opposed gay rights, abortion, feminism and other liberal issues.
Humans have five basic senses: smell, taste, hearing, sight, and touch. They also correspond to your five angelic senses. When you incorporate the human and angelic senses together, you'll have more awareness of both your physical and non-physical realities.
Three people sitting at a table with a single candle in its center and talking about the most powerful force in the universe. Each character speaks from the level of his or her own expertise, drawing from their experience examples and insights to support their convictions. In the end...
- By Peter Fenton
Vibrations created by precise combinations of sounds have long been thought to affect living beings and inanimate objects. The most powerful use of the voice in Buddhist belief is reciting a mantra. A mantra is a phrase or sentence, the sound of which embodies the power of...
Can a Smart Person Believe in God? is the provocative title of a book by Michael Guillen, theoretical physicist and former science correspondent for ABC News (he has a Ph. D. in three disciplines, physics, mathematics and astronomy, from Cornell). His answer is yes, and...
- By Jim Dreaver
A man once said to me, "I want to open my heart more. I often feel a kind of tightness in my chest, which I am sure is fear. The doctors told me there is nothing wrong with me physically." Tightness in the chest is the manifestation of a closed heart...
Prayer is our personal conversation with God. How many people have been taught how to pray, the value of prayer, or the power of prayer? Were you? And I am not talking about reciting prayers by rote...
Modern people have long wondered about ancient stories of great floods. Do they tell of real events in the distant past, or are they myths rooted in imagination?
The true secret of a great life, as I see it, is making a difference for others. All else is empty. When we’re empowering others through our sharing, that’s when we get what we really, really want. If we love something that’s bigger than we are, we’re in service...