Norbert Mercado: 107 books

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS. August 2, 1983. Catalina Smit felt a mixture of joy and anxiety knowing she would be meeting her twenty year old daughter tomorrow evening at the Schiphol International Airport. She had not seen her only child, Jacqueline, in the past ten years. The last time she saw her was during her first and only vacation in the Philippines.

The Magi, their families, and their servants slept in the tents they put up in a field near the house where the Child was. It was already past midnight when they slept, and the big star which they saw in the east shone over the village.That night, Melchor had a dream.In his dream, he saw the same...

Emperor Augustus Caesar looked to the dark southern sky on the balcony of his palace in Rome one early evening, as he had done in two nights before. He wasspending the past two nights simply gazing at the dark southern sky.His wife, who had accompanied him at their palace balcony for the past five...

“Fiestas should never be banned in the Philippines,” Catherine Steinberg told her high school batchmate from the Moncada Catholic School. She was on vacation in her hometown in the Philippines.“Do you have fiesta celebrations in Denmark, too?” Alma de la Cruz, her batchmate, asked her.“Well,...

Dismas, one of the thieves who was crucified on the right side of Jesus, recognized Annas. He met him three years ago. Annas asked for a huge sum of money from Dismas’ mother Deborah so that he could ask the Roman prison authority in Jerusalem to release Dismas’ father.

“A Sigma Rhoan should believe in the existence of the Almighty God who created this earth and the whole universe. If he does not believe in God, to me, he isnot a true Sigma Rhoan,” Attorney George Briones firmly stressed to his brothers, or brods for short, with his oratorical voice his conviction...

I was either four or five years old when my sister Aida brought us kids to the kulos at the back of the San Manuel Elementary School in barrio Lanat.Kulos is the Ilocano word for a brook or an elongated body of flowing water during the rainy season. In the summer, the kulos dried up.It was during...

Laurel kept on urging the audience to shout, Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! At first, only a few members of the audience were shouting the word. But as Laurel and the Filipino leaders on the stage kept chanting, Banzai!, most of the audience eventually shouted Banzai!, too. But two men in white t-shirts...

The city got its name from the word "beer" which means well and the word "sheba" which means covenant. Based on the Biblical account in the book of Genesis, Abram, the patriarch of the Jewish people who would later on be called Abraham, gave the King of Gerai named Abimelech seven lambs for the right...

The town of Rhinocolura had a seaport called Al Arish. Passengers from the town of Raphia in Judah travelled to Egypt by crossing the river using the boatsoperated by Egyptian entrepreneurs. This is the town where Joseph, Mary and the Child Jesus first entered when they escaped from the town of Bethlehem in Judah.

“I have always longed to come back to the Philippines. It is my home. Everything in my life started in my country,” Catherine told her seatmate, Laura Khristenson, in the plane on a long flight from Denmark to Manila.Laura was surprised.Her seatmate, a Caucasian from Denmark, was visiting the...

The French government wanted to have influence in the British-controlled Palestine after the United Nations’ 1947 partition of the ancient land to the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. The French government of Charles de Gaulle donated 5,000 rifles, 250 Bren guns, 5 million bullets, 50 bazookas, and...

Andrea Gonzales has been a newscaster and program host in DWRD Radio Davao for five years.The first news item she was to read that day in August 2016 stirred her emotions, for it was about the beheading of a local teenage boy by the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic bandit group in the island province of Sulu.The...

“Is Tarshish a big city?” Jonah asked Shaphat as they lay on wooden beds for paid passengers after dinner. “It is. It’s the center of commerce in the region. That’s why ships bring goods from other nations to be sold there. There are so many rich people in Tarshish. Commerce is good,”...