Analysis

When what someone says can be interpreted in multiple ways, we are in danger of coming to an understanding which is different to their intended message.

If, biologically, a person becomes a parent when their child is born—or, civilly, when they adopt a child—from a practical and even moral point of view, a person only becomes a parent when they master a series of crucial skills.

Before I started looking for the meaning of life, I thought I had already found it. Or, that it had been given to me. In the world I came from, the road was clearly laid out. My life's major events were all mapped out, and precious little was negotiable.

“Life seems short.” A seemingly simple phrase—until it comes from someone celebrating their 117th birthday, who has walked paths that stretch across three different centuries.

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?

What we call an “irrelevant conclusion” is an argument that gives the impression of having something to do with an idea it aims to support, but which actually shifts attention to something else.

The perspectives we acquire as children about ourselves as individuals, about the world, and even about God, become beliefs that filter and guide the choices we make as adults. Some of these beliefs are helpful. Others are not. In fact, many of the obstacles we encounter in adult life are caused by these filters.

When I was at high school, I played basketball a lot—most days at school, then team training sessions and often two or three games each week. At university, I played on the best team I have been part of. We trained and competed regularly over two years, and twice won our league championship.

In the early decades of the 18th century, America was in the throes of an identity crisis. The new American lifestyle had earned New England the nickname of “the new English Sodom.”

The relationship between religion and science is complicated, and occasional controversies over healing through prayer have not helped. The tragedy of stories in which refusing medical treatment in favour of prayer ends in death is often exploited in the press to portray religion as rudimentary and backward. That is why it is all the more interesting that a case study attesting to the...

After 25 years in the ministry, during which he never once considered leaving, Pastor Tim Kuperus admits that the last three years have been difficult enough for him to consider a different path.

The eye's intricate structure has long been a focal point in the creationism vs evolutionism debate, serving as a key example in the argument of irreducible complexity. More recently, methods of simulating the evolution of the eye have emerged, which claim to provide significant support for Darwinism. Who is right?

When a process is thought to be too slow or impractical to test experimentally, simulation science is a valuable tool for testing its validity.

The train departs Bucharest, Romania’s “little Paris”—the old city section with beautiful architecture and impressive monuments, giving way to Communist-era apartment blocks. The plain outside the city is flat and featureless, broken now and again by a grove of trees—mysterious and impenetrable to the gaze. Decrepit houses, tattooed with graffiti, a splash of colour to contrast the uniform grey buildings, marching aimlessly past...

“To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:5).