Free to make decisions for only 10% of the time

Of the approximately 26-28,000 days (73-79 years) that the average person lives, only a maximum of 10% of that time is actually spent as an adult making decisions about what to do. The rest of our time is spent in activities that are generally unavoidable.

The constraints that make us happy

American psychologist Barry Schwartz's counterintuitive study argues uncomfortably similarly to communist philosophy, while offering a stunning argument for Christianity, the enemy of communism.

“The old world is gone” | Global economic projections

"Rays of sunshine in the global economy we saw earlier in the year have been fading, and gray days likely lie ahead", says Ayhan Kose, deputy chief economist at the World Bank Group, summing up predictions for the global economy after several overlapping crises ended a nearly three-decade period of economic growth.
family

Escaping from the deadly family

Letting go of the environment and education you received at home is difficult as it is, but can there be liberation if you grew up in a family of mobsters?

Gold medal for fourth place

The Parable of the Sower appears to be the key to understanding all the other parables told by Jesus. It is neither mysterious nor cryptic; it simply provides a starting point. The apostles and all those who read the parable today are asked by Jesus Christ: "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?" (Mark 4:13). The logical conclusion...

“The woman with the book” | The weakness that unleashes the power of God

God uses the traits we dislike as well as our weaknesses to create something great, beyond our abilities and imagination. This is the message that pervades the pages of "The Woman with the Book", the biography of the missionary Gladys Aylward.

The culture of blasphemy

According to its creators, "JC" was to be a 30-minute-per-episode animated series about Jesus Christ who wanted to escape the overwhelming shadow of his father and live as an ordinary man in New York. The project was developed by comedian and writer John Michaelson. However, due to the controversial nature of the subject matter, only the pilot was produced and filmed, and it...

The stranger in your home

You must run. You only have a few days, perhaps only minutes, to pack all the things you can take with you. You don’t know whether you’ll arrive at a safer place, or whether anyone will welcome you, or whether you’ll ever return home.

Forgiveness is not an emotion

It is hard to remain indifferent to a life story like that of Terri Roberts, the mother of a young man who, in a still-unexplained moment of madness, stormed into an all-girls Amish school and began shooting, killing five of the students before killing himself.

Is there a cure? The painful limitations of the fight against paedophilia

Little over a decade ago, a highly acclaimed British documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux, stepped into the midst of 500 paedophiles admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Coalinga, California, trying to find out if the complex treatment the convicts had to go through was really working.

COVID-19: A hundred remedies for solitude

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

Breathe deep: An interview on vaping with Professor Renee Bittoun

Our brain develops, unfortunately, a quirky response to nicotine. It shouldn’t really be there. It shouldn’t be in your breath, let alone you reacting to it, let alone you smoking anything or vaping anything. We shouldn’t even be near it.

Consuming Jesus

Are we at risk of turning Christianity into just another consumer product?

Are spiritual forces real?

Ideas about death, souls and afterlife existence are often intertwined with religious or spiritual beliefs—in other words, belief in the supernatural. But are spiritual forces present or observable in this world? Do they exist? Can they be observed, defined, categorised? Are friendly ghosts and vengeful spirits lingering in haunted houses real, are the paranormal investigators you see on television really fighting an evil spirit as they claim, or...

Depression, a disease of civilisation

Five decades ago, when the World Organization for Social Psychiatry was established, many thought it was a joke. Others, being more analytical, tried to prove that mental illness can only be an individual experience; that the problem always exists only in an individual and never in a group.