Marbaniang, Domenic

Palayur Church is the oldest Christian church in India and  one of the seven founded by St Thomas the Apostle in 52 AD.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The first Indian convert to Christianity can be traced to the time when the Apostle Thomas , disciple of Jesus, came to India in around 48 AD. The Apostle Thomas sailed from Alexandra with Habban, the merchant king of Gundnaphor, to the Indus and reached Taxila (now in Punjab) about 48-49 AD. From there he went to Muziri on the Malabar Coast via Socotra about 50 AD. He reached Muziri in 51-52 AD. [1] A study of the book of the Acts in the New Testament will reveal that the apostles often chose the synagogues established in various Jewish settlements of the world as an opening ground for the preaching of the Gospel. It has been reasoned that Apostle Thomas’ choice of the Tamil coast was because of the flourishing Jewish settlements along the coast, in Madras and Cochin dating back to the Jewish Diaspora or even back to King Solomon...

© Domenic Marbaniang, 2003 The word conversion has different meanings for different people in different contexts. The various contexts are the occasion and object of conversion. That is, conversion takes place somewhere/sometime (occasion) of something (object). The Latin word convertere, from which our English term is derived, means “to turn or to change”. The whole of phenomena is a panorama of change. As Heraclitus rightly observed, “Nothing is permanent except ‘change’”. Conversion in the physical context is a reality. Every physical change has a physical cause. For instance, the United States Energy Research and Development Administration displays in show cases the “underground conversion” of coal “to synthetic natural gas”. Here, as per Aristotelian classification of causes, coal is the material cause, whereas the other factors that cause the conversion are the efficient causes. It is also proved that in the human being, mental causes can be efficient causes of psychosomatic s...

Why Gandhi Didn’t Become a Christian Quotes from Mahatma Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth Translated from Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1927 Online Book: http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/autobio/autobio.htm Chapter 20: Acquaintance with Religions About the same time I met a good Christian from Manchester in a vegetarian boarding house. He talked to me about Christianity. I narrated to him my Rajkot recollections. He was pained to hear them. He said, 'I am a vegetarian. I do not drink. Many Christians are meat-eaters and drink, no doubt; but neither meat-eating nor drinking is enjoined by Scripture. Do please read the Bible.' I accepted his advice, and he got me a copy. I have a faint recollection that he himself used to sell copies of the Bible, and I purchased from him an edition containing maps, concordance, and other aids. I began reading it, but I could not possibly read through the Old Testament. I rea...