Analysis

No matter how much we avoid it, the day will come when our parents will not be able to get by without us, just as we would not have been able to grow up without them.

Broken blade. Shaking hands. Clouded mind. “I could have killed him.”

You must run. You only have a few days, perhaps only minutes, to pack all the things you can take with you. You don’t know whether you’ll arrive at a safer place, or whether anyone will welcome you, or whether you’ll ever return home.

A photograph of a father holding his sick little boy is simply an example of parental affection, right? But it can provoke a virulent reaction when it's posted on Facebook and the protagonists are naked under the refreshing spray of water in the shower.

In one sense, it was hardly an unusual story: a big-budget Hollywood war movie with a big-name director and famous actors, featuring long and ultra-violent action sequences, with heroes and enemies.

He had made the mistake of asking the doctors for a mirror. Terrified, he saw a monster reflected in it. Lying on the hospital bed, after the doctor left, he pulled on the tube he thought was keeping him alive. He had no reason to live.

An old saying states: "If youth knew; if age could". This truth is reflected by countless studies showing that lifestyle adjustments made in middle age (or even earlier) favour a transition to a healthier old age.

Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.

We live in a world in which the news is far more pervasive than the events it reports. An event happens in one place but is almost instantly repeated and echoed in millions more. And while the event might be shocking, tragic or horrifying, a wider and sometimes greater toll is exacted by its reportage, by the slow-motion replays, by the breathless punditry...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), author of The Cost of Discipleship and one of the remarkable figures of twentieth-century Christianity, served as a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Tübingen, Berlin, and New York, in a dark period of human history. He vehemently opposed the Nazi Party's attempt to subjugate the church to the political and ideological approach of the time. He felt the political and...

Many had not yet finished clearing away the leftovers from the New Year's Eve table, almost no one had returned to work, politics was still numb and journalists yawned with boredom because almost nothing of interest had happened on 2 January 2015.

“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).

Isaac and Rebecca, two biblical characters, had problems in their marriage. At first they struggled to fall pregnant. Then, when she eventually got pregnant, it was a difficult pregnancy, which affected them very much—so much so that they didn't know what to do. I suppose they had all sorts of discussions about the situation, but at some point the discomfort just became too...

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside. 

It is said that the mental illness Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from for 11 years before he died was triggered by the philosopher witnessing a horse being whipped by its master. The cruel sight of suffering made Nietzsche run to the horse and wrap his arms around its neck to protect it. The great philosopher collapsed to the ground, and never recovered from the...