A respected academic, who just happens to be Muslim, was challenged by a Fox News anchor as to why he was qualified to write about Christ

Dr Johnson's favourite book was Robert Burton's bestselling 17th-century self-help guide The Anatomy of Melancholy. This exhaustive manual on madness and depression, first published in 1621, was so popular that, it was said, its publisher "got an estate by it". Johnson said it was the only book which would get him out of bed early.

Rupert Shortt seeks to draw attention to a strangely under-reported problem: the worldwide persecution of Christians. Some 200 million Christians are under serious threat, predominantly in Muslim countries.

Community leaders say men believed to be Fulani herdsmen attacked Tarok farmers in reprisal for cattle thefts in country's Plateau state

The Archbishop today took to Twitter in order to respond to the claims saying he had "wanted to stay longer and go further, see old friends in Bethlehem"

Patrick Cockburn sees five lives lost in the bombing of a Christian quarter of the Syrian capital

The Girl Guides and Brownies have dropped references to religion and patriotism from their official oath in an effort to welcome "all girls, of all faiths and none."

A hard-line Muslim cleric received an 11-year suspended sentence today for tearing up and burning a Bible, Egypt's official news agency said.

You might well think that Austrian director Ulrich Seidl takes a dim view of human nature. His Dog Days (2001) depicted the Vienna suburbs as hell on earth, while Import/Export (2007) set dim-witted Austrian thugs loose in a decayed Eastern Europe, while a Ukrainian nurse tried to survive in a horrifically inhospitable West. Yet you can detect a wry tenderness in his new trilogy Paradise, although you have to reach the final episode, Hope, for it to blossom into something like fondness for humanity. In the opening chapter Love, Seidl seems to give us human nature at its worst.

Both claim an interest in global justice and financial regulation, as well as a common distaste for gay marriage

Is there a modern version of hell that avoids the medieval image of demons thrusting the souls of the damned into hellfire? Indeed there is. In Catholic circles, hell is defined as an eternity spent in the absence of God.

The ‘infallible’ Pope’s proclamation that atheists will go to heaven has led to a rebuke from officials who declared they will go to hell. Jonathan Owen reports on the controversy

Spokesman says people who choose not to enter the Church 'cannot be saved'

Geza Vermes, who died on 8 May at the age of 88, was a translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls acclaimed for his books exploring the Jewish background of Christ. The scrolls were a cache of documents written between 200 BC and AD 200 discovered in caves at Qumran, near Jericho, between 1947 and 1956. Vermes published the first English translation of the scrolls in 1962. The scrolls gave an insight to Jewish practices and thought at the time Jesus was preaching, and they informed books by Vermes on the historical Jesus beginning with Jesus the Jew (1973); The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (2003) was a commentary on all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.