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Thoughts on the Incarnation The Son came out from the Father to help us to come out from the world; He descended to us to enable us to ascend to Him.  Anthony of Padua Christ became what we are that He might make us what He is.  Athanasius I hope your Christmas has had a...

We all like a good story. When God wanted to grab our attention, He gave us a book of stories. The Bible is full of God’s encounters with people.  At Christmas, we remember the story of Jesus born in Bethlehem. But this story begins back in Genesis and as we go through the Old Testament...

It was 200 years ago, on 24th December 1818 that the popular Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’ was performed for the first time, at midnight mass at a parish church in Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria. It had been written just a few hours earlier by teacher and church organist Franz Xaver Gruber, to lyrics by priest...

After Christmas, when you begin to think about the New Year, who are you planning to go on holiday with in 2019? It seems that more of us are opting for solo holidays, in order to get away from everyone.  In the past seven years, the proportion of people going on holiday on their own...

One of the most popular Christmas carols, Silent Night, was performed for the first time 200 years ago this month, on 24th December 1818, at midnight mass at a parish church in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, Austria. The carol was originally a poem, written in six verses by priest Joseph Mohr two years earlier. Because the...

by Jessica Jess Komanapalli, Authentic, £9.99 This autumn saw the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the Burundian civil war. This is one man’s amazing story of how God protected and provided for him in the midst of the Burundian civil war and brought him to a place of grace, forgiveness and restoration. Theodore Mbazumutima...

If you are taking pictures of yourself while out and about this Christmas season, please be careful where you take them.  Bizarrely, more than 250 people have died that way in the past eight years. Most selfie-related deaths were of young men, aged on average about 23.  Now the US National Library of Medicine is...

But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son…… (Galatians 4:4) Have you ever used one of those old-fashioned glass ‘egg-timers’?  Thousands of sand grains sink down from the wide top of the glass until they trickle through the tapered centre, only to fill the bottom as the glass widens out once more....

200 years ago this Christmas Eve a parish priest near Salzburg in Austria and his organist wrote a new carol for the midnight mass. The priest, Fr Joseph Mohr, provided the words in a poem he had recently written. The organist was Franz Xavier Gruber who created a tune of haunting beauty. The carol, Stille...

With Christmas coming, and with it the annual ‘celebration’ of family happiness and parties and get-togethers, many of our young people will be feeling even more lonely than ever.  And that is very lonely indeed. A recent survey has found that 16 to 24-year-olds experience loneliness more often than any other age group.  Two in...

Most of us probably know that on December 26th (the Feast of Stephen) ‘Good king Wenceslas’ looked out, writes David Winter. We probably also know that the snow lay round about, ‘deep and crisp and even’. Beyond that, he’s just someone in a carol that’s not often sung nowadays. However, Wenceslas was a real person,...

by Shaadia Firoz, Authentic, £9.99 Russian born Shaadia Firoz grew up in a Muslim family, afraid of her drunken and abusive father. Finding fame as a singer did little to fill her sense of emptiness, and a desperate search to fill this longing had her looking for love in all the wrong places. But everything...