Bethany Beyond the Jordan was a spiritual experience my lapsed Catholic self was not expecting. It reminded me that whatever ...

Though John the Baptist is celebrated in June and August, it is during Advent that the liturgy amplifies his role as the ...

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Friday consecrated a new Catholic church at Bethany Beyond the Jordan on the banks of the Jordan River officially recognized by the church as ...

Our knowledge of the figure of John the Baptist is very limited. We have only those references to him in the Christian gospels, where he stands alongside of Jesus. We also have references to him in ...

Why did Jesus need to be baptized? It was a delicate issue for the earliest Christians, as one can see in Matthew’s baptism account, in which “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be ...

I love the narrative of our Lord’s baptism. From John’s reaction to Jesus’ approach to the decent of the Dove and the Father’s proclamation, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased,” it ...

Works of great beauty by unknown artists are time’s antidotes for today’s celebrity culture. One such work is the Wilton Diptych [opposite page], a small devotional masterpiece from the end of the ...

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan has launched a $100 million master plan aimed at attracting 1 million Christian pilgrims to celebrations of the second millennium of the baptism of Jesus in 2030. The ambitious ...

Today’s gospel is a story of a very special encounter between the Lord Jesus Christ and his cousin, John the Baptist. Whether they ever met before as they were growing up, we really don’t know, as it ...