Aaron Prill | Maine

Easter, the common name for the holiday marking Jesus Christ’s return from the dead, represents Christianity’s trump card- the unique claim to eternal life. All other world religions have had human founders that lived, then died. Their lives had meaning, but ultimately their death meant nothing. In Christianity, Jesus Christ’s death meant EVERYTHING. It meant everything because by first-person historical accounts it was a death that lasted only 2 nights.

No other world religion has first-person historical accounts of their leader coming back to life. Why?… Continue reading →

I am a born-again Christian who attends a non-denominational Protestant church. At first thought you might think the election of a new Pope should not matter to me, or that I might even scoff at Catholic claims of papal authority and the whole black smoke/white smoke conclave theatrics. However, a major characteristic (and dare I say “admirable quality”) Catholics have in their ranks is organizational unity (for the most part) of their 1.2 billion adherents worldwide. In contrast, under the Protestant umbrella which approximately 840 million subscribe to some flavor or another, there are more denominations (re: divisions) than you can shake a stick at.

At the top of this organizational unity within Roman Catholicism is of course the Bishop of Rome – the Pope. Since Pope Benedict announced his historic resignation, I have immersed myself in researching Catholic beliefs and theology out of mere curiosity and intrigue. As an adult convert to Christianity, everything is still relatively new to me so I just try to soak it all in with an open mind. Continue reading →

Recently I was perusing CNN.com when a certain article, linked only about half way down the front page, caught my eye. The article was a community-submitted blog post called “Why I Raise My Children Without God”, and as someone who blogs about Christian perspectives I could not resist reading this mother’s take on things. I must admit I immediately felt an inner grieving of the Holy Spirit for her and almost clicked away after the first paragraph. However, I forged ahead and read through the whole article wincing with every sentence.

After finishing the article I sat in utter disbelief of this mother’s utter disbelief, and pondered what to do next. Should I just put it out of my mind and let her charges against God go unanswered, joining the large chorus of atheism becoming ever more prevalent in our fallen society?

Then I read it again… Continue reading →

The year begins with big ideas and lofty goals. Then without notice hours turn to days, days to weeks, and weeks to months until suddenly we are back where we started- at January 1st again- with not much accomplished. Life seems so temporal- because it is.

So what can we do about the fact that life passes us by and we only seem to spin our wheels? The answer, though it doesn’t seem intuitive, is to slow down.

Unplug. Read. Reflect. Pray. Prioritize. Continue reading →

Late last month Angus T. Jones, the child star who plays the character “Jake” on the CBS “hit” show “Two and a Half Men”, became embroiled in a controversy when a YouTube video of him calling the show “filth” went viral. A large part of the attraction of this story is that these comments are a direct result of Jones’ recent conversion to the Christian faith. Despite this story’s convergence with two of this blog’s topics- entertainment and Christianity- I have initially refrained from writing about it.

The show’s co-star Ashton Kutcher has now weighed in, saying he wants Jones fired immediately, and calling him a “spoiled brat”- a rather ironic epithet coming from Kutcher for sure. As more time has passed to let the story play out, and in light of this recent criticism from Kutcher being made public, I feel the desire to opine why Jones’ comments were unavoidable given his recent life change. Continue reading →