Analysis

What can you do in the face of a terrible diagnosis, which condemns you to life in a wheelchair? What can you choose besides despair or resignation? Kayla chose to run.

On a number of occasions during his writing life, Nobel Prize winner and author Elie Wiesel tried to re-tell the story of a profound experience he’d had as a young boy in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He wrote a play, a novel, and even a cantata to try to re-create his memory of this event, each of which remained unpublished. Finally,...

In recent weeks, we have all experienced a state of unrest. Our eyes have been on the rising numbers of COVID-19 infections, as we try to comply with the restrictions imposed by the state of emergency. But we have also had bright moments, moments we might not have anticipated just a short time ago.

The Baptist Church has made significant contributions to religious life by embracing the principle of separation of church and state and the principle of religious freedom.

I generally don’t like going to funerals, but they come in many different forms and feels. Some seem sadder than others; some feel more hopeful. But often there’s an unexpected bittersweetness. We are all there because of something good—the life, love and relationship that we are there to remember and honour—that has come to a tragic end, always too soon.

Is the chimpanzee the human’s closest relative in the animal world? According to the theory of evolution, the answer is a categorical YES. Specialised literature abounds in generous estimates of human-chimpanzee genetic similarity, ranging from 96% to 99%. But how are these percentages obtained, what assumptions do they hide, and what do they mean beyond the evolutionary interpretation?

This article contains stories of kindness, courage and generosity. By their simplicity they prove that all it takes to do good is a heart that is open to the needs of others.

The idea of the end of the world refers to the end of the social order and humanity; the end of the planet as we know it. But according to the Bible, these will not all come at once.

When we are isolated with our family, problems that are sometimes easy to ignore become more acute, and the need to receive and offer forgiveness to those around us becomes increasingly evident.

The Jewish people walked on dry land in the middle of the water, not in the Red Sea, but somewhere in the Nile Delta. This conclusion by researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado (USA) made headlines on Reuters and the BBC in September 2010.

"You cannot recognise the wisdom of a wise man whom you have not tested" (Papyrus Insinger, XII, 15).

Almost a century ago, writer Virginia Woolf noticed people’s tendency to approach books “with clouded and divided minds, asking fiction to be true, poetry to be false, biographies to be flattering and history to chime with prejudices.”

Joaquín Carmona had 16,000 followers on Twitter, and his posts about Spanish athletics were appreciated even by sport professionals. None of his followers had ever met him in person, and when silence fell on his account for three months, people began to look for him, write to him and ask who Carmona really was.

What do you do when things go wrong and everything around you seems to crumble? Do you keep your eyes forward and try to find a solution? Or do you fall into endless complaining?

If optimism helps us get rid of problems more easily, too much optimism does the exact opposite: it amplifies them. Pushed to the extreme, positive thinking prescribed as an antidote to suffering prevents us from accepting reality as it is and starting to look for solutions that can make our lives easier.