All Blogs
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Heroes of the Faith: Jarena Lee
Jarena Lee overcame many struggles and much opposition to become the first black woman preacher in the United States. Jarena was born into a free black family in New Jersey...
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Miracle on 34th Street
My favourite Miracle on 34th Street is the 1994 version starring Sir Richard Attenborough. This feel-good classic tells the heart-warming story of a young girl’s desire for a fully functional family, complete...
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The Family Man
A common experience at this time of year is to pick up a Christmas card from an old friend and reflect on the past. Should I have left that job?...
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Christmas at the Movies: It’s a Wonderful Life
It’s a Wonderful Life follows the life of George Bailey, born and raised in the typical American small town of Bedford Falls. But he is someone with ambition and imagination who...
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Heroes of the Faith: Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved black woman who became one of the first published writers in North America, was a Christian who fought the horror of slavery. Phillis was born in...
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Christmas at the Movies: A Christmas Carol
Our modern Christmas celebration owes an enormous amount to Charles Dickens’ popularisation of a food-filled, feel-good, family-focused festival. A Christmas Carol has been filmed many times but my favourite is the...
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Heroes of the Faith: Tom Rees
Tom Rees was an evangelist who proclaimed the gospel, and here I should declare a personal interest: he was my wife’s great-uncle, the brother of Dick Rees, her grandfather, who...
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Heroes of the Faith: Lillian Trasher
Lillian Trasher spent a lifetime in Egypt, where she created one of the world’s largest orphanages with small resources but enormous faith. Born in Florida in 1887, Lillian came to...
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Heroes of the Faith: Bede
Although Bede, the great Anglo-Saxon monk, scholar and historian, spent all his life in north-east England, his influence spread across Europe and gained him the title the ‘Venerable Bede’. Bede...
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Heroes of the Faith: Ida Scudder
There is no more outstanding example of a Christian dynasty than the Scudder family, of whom it could be written in 1959 that ‘forty-two members through four generations had given...
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Heroes of the Faith: Perpetua
Of the many accounts of the martyrdom of early Christians, one of the most compelling is that of a woman, Perpetua, who was executed in an arena at Carthage, now...
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Heroes of the Faith: Brother Andrew
When in September 2022 the Dutchman Andy van der Bijl, better known as Brother Andrew, died, many obituaries emphasised his dramatic role in the Fifties and Sixties as ‘God’s Smuggler’....