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There can be no doubt that the apostles’ great work of evangelization took them to the ends of the earth. Of the eventual ends of the Twelve themselves, by which they glorified the God they served, there are many pious legends, several ancient histories that may include creditable material, and a few solid facts. The first to be lost was James, the elder brother of John—who never made it out of the home base of Jerusalem. James had once asked the Lord for a place at his right hand in the kingdom …

Can God change the past?No . . . and this question is a real doozy! (But a doozy that brings with it important clarifications of the nature of God’s power.)If you enjoy science fiction, you’ve undoubtedly encountered stories of time travel, like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. One common theme in these stories is to travel back in time to prevent some horrible event (like Hitler’s rise to power). To make up a quick example, perhaps a time traveler eats a rabbit, unwittingly depriving a starving w …

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 …