When Caesar Augustus decided to conduct a census of the Roman Empire, he did not send interviewers door to door to count each village’s residents, as is the practice in the USA’s census-taking. Instead, he required each man to return “to his own city.” In Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 2, this accounts for why Joseph leaves his northern home in Galilee and undertakes a weeklong journey with his wife-to-be to the town of Bethlehem, which is in southern Judea. But why is Joseph in Galilee in the first place? If his ties to Judea are so strong that he must return there for the census, what could have mo ..read more

When America was a colony, it was heavily involved in shipping and foreign trade. Britain garnered the lion’s share of American goods but, today, every school child learns about the slave-sugar-rum triangle with the Caribbean and African nations. It is less well-known that a significant number of American merchants plied the waters of the Mediterranean, trading with many nations and cities on that sea. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 brought home an overlooked truth. When it was a British colony, American shipping trade had been protected by the might of the British Navy, which domina ..read more

King Herod the Great has a bad reputation. He went insane during the last decade of his life and, when the madness took him, he killed people. His victims included his favorite wife, several sons and the babies of Bethlehem, as Matthew’s Gospel relates. If we can set aside these moral failings, difficult as it may be, we discover that, before his illness, Herod was a brilliant economist whose strategic investments in his country raised Judea’s living standards and enriched the kingdom so much that he twice reduced taxes. Economic activity requires investment of either labor or capital. Most p ..read more

Many evangelical Christians believe the world is about to end as Jesus returns to establish his heavenly kingdom on Earth. The reason for this, they think, is that the people of the world have become so evil and are doing so many horrible things that more wickedness is not possible. If the trigger for Jesus’ second coming is the total evil in the world -- the largest amount of horrible deeds people do to each other -- then I respectfully suggest he missed the moment. One hundred years ago this coming November, World War I ended. That brought to a close five years of unrelenting war in which 9 ..read more

It seems that nearly everyone who has written about the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case agrees: The Supreme Court wimped out. Its June 4 decision gave no legal guidance as to whether a person running a public business can refuse a sale to someone on the basis of deeply held religious beliefs -- in this case, a baker who refused to decorate a custom cake for a gay wedding. The lack of guidance is disappointing because more cases arguing a person’s “religious freedom” to refuse service on the basis of religious beliefs are heading to the court, and SCOTUS will not b ..read more

According to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus told his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations.” And, that is the story the New Testament tells. The apostle Paul’s letters are addressed to churches he founded across the northern Mediterranean lands and, although the Acts of the Apostles begins in Jerusalem, it quickly moves to stories of evangelizing gentiles in the countries beyond Galilee and Judea. The land of Israel became important to early Christianity only under Emperor Constantine, who, in the early fourth century, made Christianity an accepted religion across the Roman Empire. He ..read more

There have always been religious organizations on college campuses. Some were quiet and private, while others were loud and boisterous, always ready to tell others about themselves. In the 1980s, perhaps the most visible student religious groups were evangelical. Not only were evangelical churches represented, but there was Campus Crusade for Christ, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators and others. The word “evangelical” comes from the Greek word “euangelion” -- meaning “good news” -- and was rendered into English as “gospel.” And, that is just what these evangelical groups do th ..read more

February 14, 2018 By Paul V.M. Flesher The FBI collects statistics about hate crimes in the United States. These are crimes that were motivated by hatred against the victims -- whether a hatred of their race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. A look at the information from 2016, the most recent year available, reveals a number of surprises, especially about hate crime directed at religions and religious people. The first surprise is that there are so few crimes motivated by hatred of a particular religion. For 2016, only 1,273 such crimes were reported to the FBI by police departme ..read more

January 18, 2018 By Paul V.M. Flesher In a recent survey, college seniors were asked questions from a high school-level test on American history. Over 75 percent scored a D or below! While the disappointment expressed by history professors, politicians and the media over the students’ performance is certainly justified, it was the questions on the test that I found most disappointing. Despite this country’s proud religious heritage and the influence of religion at nearly every stage of our history, none of the questions asked about religion. It was as if religion had been dropped from the ..read more

January 31, 2018 You think you have a rough commute? Consider my friend “Sally.” Sally is a Palestinian Christian living with her aged parents in Bethlehem. She works in Jerusalem, about 10 miles from their apartment. After boarding a bus at 6:30 a.m., she arrives at the wall separating the two cities by 7. At the checkpoint, everyone disembarks and stands in line to be individually frisked. This happens outside -- in the cold winter rain or the hot summer sun. If it is a good day, the searches go without incident, and she boards a bus and reaches work by 8. If the guards are suspicious, the ..read more