Recently I spoke with a friend named Carol (name changed) who had just returned from a difficult ocean cruise. She works for an organization that was helping to sponsor the getaway for a group of more than 1,000 people. In the middle of winter, Carol flew with her colleagues from Chicago to Mobile, Alabama, where they were to board the ship. As she and hundreds of other excited vacationers waited ...

All beauty in the world is either a memory of Paradise or a prophecy of the transfigured world.

—Nicholas Berdyaev, Russian religious and political philosopher (1874–1948)

A Hindu seer almost incited a riot by failing to die as foretold. The chief cleric of Sriguru Ashram in eastern India had predicted that his soul would leave his body sometime on the morning of November 17, 2004, and 15,000 people showed up to watch.

The crowd was quiet when he sat down to meditate at 6:00 a.m., but turned violent when he was still alive at noon. A police baton-charge was required ...

How do you react when people talk about the end of the world, or about Christ returning to earth? Here is how one columnist felt about it:

During a taxi ride one day in February, a driver in Baltimore asked how I was doing. I told him my plans for the near future.

He turned around, gave me a very strange look, and said: "I don't want to scare you, but the world is gonna end in seven months."

Hundreds ...

Life or Something Like It is about an ambitious TV news reporter who believes she is living the perfect life. Lanie Kerrigan (Angelina Jolie) has a great career, good looks, friends, and a boyfriend. However, an encounter with a street prophet gives her bad news about her future, throwing her dreams and life perspective into a tailspin.

The street prophet is an unkempt, homeless man who is drawing ...

Some years ago my wife and I went to see Shakespeare's Hamlet. Near the end of the play there is a climactic fight scene—guys swordplay all over the stage. Well, that night, right in the middle of all that action, Hamlet suddenly shouted, "Stop! Stop!" All the actors stopped and looked puzzled. Then Hamlet stepped to the edge of the stage and said, "Someone's been hurt. Is there a doctor in ...

William Miller seemed an unlikely striker of panic. He tended a farm in Vermont, fought in the War of 1812, and served as a justice of the peace. His religious life, however, had not been so steady.

Early in life, Miller followed Deism, the rationalistic faith of many American intellectuals (and several founding fathers). He converted to Christianity in 1816, then began assiduous study of the Scriptures. ...

My friend Bryan saw [God's providence]. Aboard a plane to Salt Lake City, Bryan got acquainted with his seatmates, a mother and her ten-year-old daughter. The lady found it intriguing that Bryan was a minister and peppered him with questions. Eventually, Bryan shared his story with her—of how Jesus Christ had changed everything about his life—and ended up praying with them both as they invited Jesus ...

In a "60 Minutes" interview with Ed Bradley, Denzel Washington spoke of a pivotal moment in his life.

Washington was in college at the time and was dealing with questions about his future. As he sat in a chair in his mother's beauty salon, he saw an elderly lady in the mirror. She stared at Denzel and suddenly spoke to his mother, saying, "Give me a piece of paper; I have a word for [Denzel]." On ...

From what I can tell, Mark Twain was not a Christian, nor did he claim to be when he began courting Olivia Langdon. Back in Twain's day, a man typically had to get permission from a woman's parents before marrying her. Mark Twain had a problem, however. Olivia Langdon came from a professing Christian family that would not allow their daughter to marry an unbeliever. To overcome this obstacle, Twain ...