Historian and haematologist Dr Duffin diagnosed severe acute leukaemia from a bone marrow sample. Surprisingly the patient survived, following prayers to a woman 200 years previously who had become Canada's first Catholic saint. This led Duffin to explore the Vatican Secret Archives. Four purported miracles must lie behind every 'saint', but...
This excellent short book deserves to be widely read, not least by Christian doctors and church leaders. 'Health and wealth prosperity teaching' flourishes across the world. Bible teachers should understand what the Bible says about wealth, but medical people with pastoral hearts are needed in every congregation to unravel the...
The document, Some Issues in Human Sexuality,[1] recently debated in the General Synod, raises important questions about the significance of bisexuality, not least for our understanding of sexual orientation.[2] It claims, for instance, that Ancient Greek and Roman cultures did not have sexual orientation terminology in their language (p219). They...
One of the biggest, multi-faith, prayer experiments ever devised has concluded that prayer made no significant difference to the outcomes of the cardiac patients involved. A pilot study had suggested that prayer could have a measurable effect on the outcome of patients who required angioplasty, a surgical procedure to unblock...
A report to the Chief Medical Officer by an independent working party has considered best practice in managing Chronic Fatigue.[1] But the working party’s conclusions caused six resignations from its committee. The four medical specialists who resigned constituted the majority of the expert medical members. The working party had used...
It seems strange that the birth of any individual should become the internationally agreed pivotal point for counting history. How did this come about? Last year, BBC Radio Four carried out an opinion poll to name the most important English man or woman of the last millennium. A shortlist of...
The most extraordinary deeds were attributed to Christ. The apostle John, in his account, called them 'signs': that is, authenticating signs, pointing to Christ's true identity. So, for instance, he is reported to have stilled a storm, leaving his followers dumbfounded. The Psalmist had written of God, 'He stills the...
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Jesus is that he claimed to know the Truth. He reckoned he knew what was right and what was wrong; where men and women came from and where they were heading. There is a great paradox here. His gentleness and humility are pervaded by a...
None of these aspects of Jesus' life is based on meagre evidence. They are major themes that permeate every piece of information we have about him. They are so interwoven that the only alternative approach is to maintain that the Jesus of the Gospels is substantially a figure of fiction...
Christ's execution at the hands of the Romans in about 30AD must surely be the most famous death of all time. His cross became the central symbol of Christianity, but why was it so significant? The apostle Paul, in a letter he wrote around 54AD to the Christians in Corinth, gave...