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In August 1619, a slave ship captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha carried 350 Africans toward Vera Cruz, New Spain. Before it arrived, Captain Cunha’s ship was attacked and robbed by an English corsair that then sold about twenty of those Africans in Virginia. It was the first recorded transaction of its kind in the colonies, and thus began slavery in what would become the United States of America. When the first Africans were sold in the colonies, conscience and tradition gave at least some of …

There was one book C.S. Lewis said he didn’t enjoy writing. I know how he felt. In 1942, Lewis published The Screwtape Letters, which consists of a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to his incompetent, inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, who is learning how to tempt people. The book is one of Lewis’s most popular, due in part to the uniqueness of its primary literary device. Instead of writing yet another book on how to avoid temptation, Lewis lets us “peer behind enemy lines” …

Almost 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul wrote to his young apprentice Timothy about the terrible times to come:“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”(2 Tim. 3:2-4). In the next line of the passage quoted above, Paul continues his description o …

The vast majority of Christians believe that baptism is a means of salvation—Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and even some Calvinists. Only Baptists and those springing from the radical side of the Reformation reject this.On the part of Catholics, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that baptism is “necessary for salvation” because “God has bound salvation to the sacrament” and that the Church “does not know of any means other than bapti …

The Catholic Church teaches that when we partake of the Eucharist in Holy Communion, we are literally consuming the body and blood of Jesus Christ. A key passage from Scripture that Catholics, and other believers in the Real Presence, have looked to throughout the centuries as biblical support for this teaching is John 6:48-67. There are many reasons Catholics, and other believers in the Real Presence, give as to why we should take Jesus’ words, “eat my flesh, drink my blood,” literally. But p …