Analysis

In the maximalist search for evidence that can justify our belief and, at the same time, help us defend our reputation, something is lost: the very concept of faith.

"Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality." This is the sentence French biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand (son of the writer Edmond de Rostand) used to begin the preface of a book on cryonics, The Prospect of Immortality, by the physics professor and science fiction writer Robert C. W. Ettinger.

In the most difficult moments of his life, Franz Hasel prayed: “Lord, if I am attacked, I will have no way to defend myself. I must trust in You to be my protector. My life is in Your hands.”

Until 2013, we only knew about the existence of Batman, the famous comic book hero, but almost a decade ago the whole world also got to know Batkid, a real boy from San Francisco, USA, whose story confirms the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.”

1. I remember that day, 9/11. It was chaos. Violence, shortage of food. For several days, it was uncertain if there would be more...

For La Tanya Butler, childhood memories are imbued with the injustices that Black people regularly endured at the hands of white people at a time when discrimination was enshrined in law.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

May 1944. The train stopped at the station and twins Eva and Miriam, with their father and mother and sisters Edit and Aliz, stepped out into the sunlight. There was war in Europe and the Nazis had gathered them and thousands of other Jews in Romania, crammed them into cattle cars and taken them to Poland.

I like to look back. When I am climbing a mountain, it is an excuse to rest. But I also do it for another reason—to see how far I have climbed.

Sometimes I think I was born with a magnifying glass in my hand, one through which I critically scrutinize everything I do and say and which relentlessly magnifies every imperfection.

I was there, I saw him. He was coming towards me mechanically, impassively, coldly. He suddenly stopped in front of me and waited for me to speak. For a moment, I froze. He was tall, thin, his face oval and his eyes blue, slightly sunken under his eyelids. I had met such people before, but there was something special about him.

It's intuitively inappropriate to talk about happiness when the subject is depression. But it is even more inappropriate to talk about abnormality, inadequacy or maladjustment in the same context.

In a society marked by the disintegration of the Christian perspective on sexuality, what is there left for us to learn from Scripture?

When I watch chicks hatch in a nest and begin to perform the instinctive behaviours of their species, I think about what we might understand about ourselves, the human species, if we had the perspective of such a privileged observer.

The appeal to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is an error in thinking which argues that a conclusion is true because there is no evidence against it, or that a conclusion is false because there is no evidence in its favour.