Analysis

As a book editor who works in a Christian publishing house, I know prayer works from a sales perspective. Books on the topic of prayer are consistently among our best sellers. It seems that many of our customers and readers—mostly people of faith, but including people who are interested but uncertain about faith—are keen to be reassured that prayer works and to find...

The question of human suffering concerns atheists and believers alike. For the former, the search for an answer drives them to the heights of despair. For the latter, suffering inevitably poses a dilemma: why is there so much suffering in the world if the God who created it is loving and omnipotent?

Mainstream culture has tried to airbrush guilt out of everyday life. It’s the ultimate social faux pas, it seems, to make someone feel guilty—How dare you judge me! Or maybe it’s the penultimate faux pas, because what’s even worse than making someone feel guilty inside is to shame them in front of others.

Lace-edged rumours wafted through the student campus in Sagunto, Spain: Devin, one of the American boys who had come to Spain for a year of study, was dating Teresa, a second-year theology student who was hard to miss. Her striking beauty and cheerful nature attracted gazes like a magnet. No one suspected then, not even the protagonists of this relationship, that their love...

There are predictions made in the Bible. Have all the predictions of the past been fulfilled? If not, what does the failure of some of them to be fulfilled say about the credibility of the Bible?

I’ll never be able to separate the memories of childhood from that of books. They intertwine like colours in fabrics, in a jumble of real and fantastical, bitter and sweet, joy and guilt.

This topic seems to be a matter of picking through the rubbish in order to survive. Who cares about Protestant protest today? Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Protestantism, represents natural and culturally legitimate attitudes that can be judged by their motivation, spirit and content—aspects that are apparently obscure but, when examined, become very transparent.

"Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose." (Beverley Nichols)

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” said Nietzsche in one of his essays back in 1889. Easier said than done when you’re facing unemployment, illness, rejection, or a blank exam paper. We tend to see these as things we need to get rid of. This can’t possibly be the life we wanted.

In the age of the internet and the “global village,” an irrational fear taking hold in a small American town can easily go viral, reaching and affecting us all. Once online, news—whether true or false—can have a corrosive effect, leading us to feel cynical about the future and to hold low expectations for our leaders.

For anyone who has ever dieted to lose weight, weight regain is the most feared nightmare. Unfortunately, the very biology of those who lose weight predisposes them to weight regain, meaning that, despite their initial success, they are likely to regain the weight they lost. Fortunately, there are strategies that can help people fight against this tendency.

"Loneliness irritates me like a broken nail," says a line in a Romanian poem. The truth is, loneliness stings, pulls apart, and resembles the coffee dregs left at the bottom of the pot in which joy and love once brewed. Although the fear of loneliness is natural, we can choose to see solitude as something more than a "flowering wilderness" and embrace it...

If we were to make an assessment of today's Christianity, which kind of sacrifice would we notice more frequently—the kind offered by Cain or by Abel? Cain offered a sacrifice from the fruits of the earth, and Abel from the sheep of his flock. While Abel’s sacrifice was pleasing to God, Cain’s sacrifice was rejected. From the very beginning, God has expressed His...

Marquis Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), a mathematician and astronomer and one of history’s most influential scientists, once had a meeting with Napoleon Bonaparte. Laplace came to offer the first consul of the republic a copy of his book, “Traité de mécanique celeste” (Treatise on Celestial Mechanics)—an analysis of the solar system that expanded on Isaac Newton’s conclusions.

Although the concept of human dignity may appear relatively recent from a historical perspective, the notion of human worth has a long history, as evidenced by accounts in the Book of Genesis, Cicero, and Kant, among others.