Joshua Spatha

Baptism. It is a sacrament and a fundamental aspect of the Christian faith, and yet often is fundamentally misunderstood. It is instructed as the essential first step in making the decision to follow Christ, yet it is often either delayed or treated as optional and unnecessary. Many questions continue to swirl regarding its practice, application, and purpose, and part of the issue lies in the fact that its ancient Near Eastern meaning is lost on a modern, Westernized audience. But baptism is...

Was the universe designed and created or was it a cosmic accident, a product of time and chance? The debate has raged for millennia with increasing sophistication in models, data, and arguments, particularly since The Enlightenment period. The West is currently captivated by naturalistic explanations with nearly all scientific funding and investigation aimed exclusively and myopically at material causes. But beneath the naturalistic paradigm lies a deeper paradox—that not only did non-living...

Modern Western civilization largely believes that all that exists is matter and its movements (energy), otherwise known as the physical world . Those who adhere to this view of reality are known as materialists , and while this view certainly gained prominence after The Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, it is not at all a modern idea to the West, but rather, it dates back to at least the 5th century BC with Greek philosophers such as Leucippus and Democritus. But despite its...