Pocket apocalypse: The end of the world in the press

The image of an apocalypse generated by a microscopic coronavirus has been sketched more than once by the press in the past few weeks.

Return to meaning

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

Can too much salt (really) affect your health?

Could it be true? Are we eating too much salt? Is too much salt dangerous or beneficial?

Jesus, the One who calls us by name

What I love most about Jesus is the deeply personal, highly individual way He relates to people around Him—the openness, genuine interest, and respect...

To raise an Amish child

I’m a walking contradiction when it comes to technology. I spend far too much time on the internet—some productive, such as paying bills, researching for my work and reading the news, but mostly wasted time on one-too-many funny cat videos—but I’m still using a Nokia E71 mobile phone bought in 2009. (Don’t laugh! It did win Mobile Choice’s phone of the year in...

Spanish flu to COVID-19: Lessons from a forgotten pandemic

The Spanish flu filled graves in almost every cemetery in the world. However, surprisingly, this tragedy had largely been forgotten until recently. A century later, the issue returned to the centre of attention, with specialists wondering if they can identify a pattern in the evolution of the COVID-19 health crisis based on the pandemic from a century ago.

The search for meaning

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Homer the Heretic,” Homer Simpson has a conversation with God.

Equivocation: Playing hide-and-seek in communication

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.

Real information is dialogue

I request from my colleagues at the ST.N editorial office at least three sources for news and at least two books for the analysis topics: one for and one against. Ideally, the reading of the first two books will give rise to the desire to look for at least two more, so that the differences are clearer. After that, there will be a...

The queen of small, guilty pleasures

"Did you hear what he did?" "Guess what we found out about our new colleague!" In spite of their apparent enthusiasm, gossips—people who laugh loudly and try to capture the attention of others through the tantalising information they have to share—are often not as happy as they seem.

How to grow together with God

We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.

Chernobyl: The cost of lies

On April 26th 1986, reactor 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded. The effects were catastrophic­­—it was the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion let out the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs-worth of radiation, and the area around Chernobyl—including the town of Pripyat—is now uninhabited. It will be unsafe to live there for the next 20,000 years.

February 24, 2022 | The night that changed everything (I)

My husband and I realised that the inevitable had happened; rumours of a war in Ukraine had intensified in the previous month.

When love errs…

Henry Ford is believed to have said: “Sometimes a mistake can be all it takes to make a valuable achievement.” Apparently paradoxical, the statement says a lot about us and what we consider at any given moment to be “a mistake.”

COVID-19: What if we received bad news in a void?

What if there was no good news to give us confidence that we could get through the troubles facing us now? What if there was no good news to assure us that we are cherished, loved and supported, that we are not alone?