Analysis

Poverty and laughter don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. People who are worried about where their next meal will come from or where their children will sleep that night find it hard to wear smiles.

Almost a century ago, writer Virginia Woolf noticed people’s tendency to approach books “with clouded and divided minds, asking fiction to be true, poetry to be false, biographies to be flattering and history to chime with prejudices.”

I talked to Pastor Nicu Butoi about the role that religion could play in treating depression and hopelessness, at the end of a series of evangelistic presentations he gave to a full-house before the pandemic.

In a study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers came to the counterintuitive conclusion that people with higher intelligence have higher levels of generalised trust.

If we were to liken life to the Olympics, then we would easily understand two fundamental things: you can’t score first in all the tests and, even in the areas where you are very capable, you can win by doing less than your best if those you compete against are not much of a challenge.

Although the holiday of Christmas does not have a biblical origin and did not exist in the days of the early church, most Christians around the world keep it as a reminder of the miracle of Jesus Christ’s birth. However, the religious significance of the holiday is waning in the Western world, as the number of church members decreases and Bible illiteracy increases.

Whether we admit it or not, our lives are conditioned by money—mostly by the lack thereof. There are few who manage to snatch themselves out from under its spell, and even fewer who want it just to be able to give it away. Among the latter is Rachel Lapierre.

My brother and I were thrashing through the bush en-route to a peak overlooking Airlie Beach in far North Queensland. A short hike that was only meant to be 800 metres seemed to go on forever. We stopped every person returning from the lookout to enquire about how much longer it would take for us to get there. “Oh just another 10 minutes,”...

The controversy surrounding organic foods is far from being resolved. Some argue it’s merely a marketing tool aimed at emptying consumers’ pockets, while others believe they’ve found the path to better health, provided they can afford the luxury.

"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?

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.

I once served on a jury and, to my surprise, was voted foreman. The accused was charged with manslaughter, a serious crime with quite a harsh penalty; while driving an aged-care minivan filled with pensioners, he’d hit and killed a pedestrian. The defendant was a facility volunteer who had been taking a group of pensioners shopping. His vehicle collided with the deceased in...

For many Christians, the belief that souls go to Heaven or Hell after death is a cultural legacy rather than a conclusion reached through personal analysis of the biblical text.

Renold Vatubua Quinlan is a “proud Dunghutti man” with Fijian heritage. He grew up on the mid-north coast of New South Wales around Port Macquarie and Kempsey. Known as the Dunghutti Destroyer, Quinlan is a professional boxer who held the IBO super-middle weight title from 2016 to 2017. “My biggest experience in my life was winning the world title,” he said. 

Since the outbreak of the corona virus pandemic, many people are asking faith-based questions. Is this a judgment of God on the human race? Is this a sign of the End? Does Bible prophecy speak about it? Even if people don’t believe in God or the Bible, they are wondering what their Christian neighbors are thinking about the matter.