Ask most people what Judaism says about life after death and they will tell you one of two things: either that Judaism focuses on this world and does not really say much about the next one, or that it teaches the immortality of the soul. Both answers miss what is actually one of the most … Read more
No book in the Bible has been read more, argued over more, or misunderstood more than the Book of Revelation. It sits at the end of the Christian scriptures like a sealed door that everyone wants to open, and for two thousand years people have been trying to force that door with every tool available: … Read more
Few figures in all of Islamic thought generate as much hope, as much debate, and as much confusion as the Imam Mahdi. For over a billion Muslims around the world, the Mahdi is not a myth or a metaphor. He is a real future person whose coming is as certain as the rising of the … Read more
Every few generations, Jewish history produces a moment of collective holding of breath. A figure emerges, or rumor of one spreads, and for a brief and electric season, ordinary Jews from Portugal to Poland, from Yemen to New York, begin to ask the same question: could this be him? Could this be the Mashiach, the … Read more
Imagine the scene that has been described in tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind novels. Planes falling from the sky because pilots have vanished mid-flight. Highways full of driverless cars. Hospitals where surgeons have disappeared from operating theatres. Every Christian in the world suddenly and silently removed from the earth, leaving behind … Read more
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, held up two fingers pressed close together and said: I and the Hour have been sent like this. That statement was made fourteen centuries ago. And yet every generation of Muslims that has lived since has looked at the world around them, read the hadith describing the signs … Read more
Most people who have heard the phrase Olam Ha-Ba believe they know what it means. They imagine something roughly equivalent to the Christian heaven or the Islamic Jannah: a positive afterlife destination for the righteous, contrasted with Gehinnom as a place of punishment for the wicked. This understanding is not entirely wrong, but it captures … Read more
Here is a fact that surprises most people who hear it for the first time. The word antichrist appears exactly five times in the entire Bible. Every single one of those appearances is in two short letters written by the Apostle John. Not one of them appears in the Book of Revelation. Not one appears … Read more
The 10 Definitive Events Before the Final Hour — From Authentic Hadith The companions were sitting together, talking quietly among themselves. The subject was the Day of Judgment, the way people who have thought deeply about something will sometimes discuss it among themselves, turning the great questions over in their hands the way you might … Read more
There is a piece of land in the middle of Jerusalem that measures roughly thirty-seven acres. It is less than a third of a mile long. You could walk across it in about ten minutes. And yet there is arguably no piece of real estate on the surface of the earth that carries more religious, … Read more