philippians on Myth

During each full moon, believing himself equal to the Roman gods, the Roman emperor Caligula would summon the moon goddess to share his bedchamber. When he asked Aulus Vitellius—a member of the Roman ...

The myth seems to be that you’re born with some magic combination of parents, DNA, and lucky breaks, and they conspire to determine what you accomplish in life. Nonsense. And a good thing, too, becaus...

Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parce...

God could have chosen any method to save us, but he used the cross. The cross is our spiritual centerpiece, the sign of our soul’s emancipation. However, the pre-Christian cross might offer a sliver ...

Chuck DeGroat's When Narcissism Comes to Church is a crucial work for anyone working close to ministers. It sheds light on some of the more pervasive behavior we see in the celebrity pastor or...

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham begins by describing a single event that led to a personal journey into addressing her struggles with comparison. Having recently moved to a...

In the ancient world, a place where the veil between the earthly and spiritual was easily pierced, rumors and gossip about great leaders being born of the gods, especially amongst royals, was somewhat...

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

There is an iconic scene in the cult classic The Matrix that makes for a great metaphor. Morpheus gives Neo a choice between two pills: You can take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake up in y...

Medical literature is replete with case reports of patients dying, not from actual illness, but from believing they were sick, from the fear they were going to die.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.

We are what we believe we are.

In The God-Shaped Brain , Timothy R. Jennings tells a well-attested story about how belief can affect the body. Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local...

Faith makes all evil good to us, and all good better; unbelief makes all good evil, and all evil worse. Faith laughs at the shaking of the spear; unbelief trembles at the shaking of a leaf, unbelief s...

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this tr...

I believe that it is the paradox between serving a healing God and the persistence of illness and even death that ultimately lies behind most theological debates about divine healing in the Church. ...

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong as long as you are merely using i...

Origen, in the third century, had a great analogy. He told of a village with a huge statue—so immense you couldn’t see exactly what it was supposed to represent. Finally, someone miniaturized the stat...

There is one other problem people can have with the Trinity: that the word never appears in the Bible. Now that doesn’t sound good, and it’s given rise to the legend of the Trinity as the invention of...

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.

Nevertheless, what was shameful, even odious, to the critics of Christ, was in the eyes of his followers most glorious. They had learnt that the servant was not greater than the master, and that for t...

While global flights and online booking have made travel easier in many ways, other aspects, often related to safety and security, still create challenges. As often as I fly, I could tell you plenty o...

Every creator, from a child with Play-Doh to Michelangelo, learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other opt...

Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity. That is not to say that Judaism doesn’t have dogma or doctrine. It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action...

This is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its messa...