Analysis

Dr Zeno L. Charles-Marcel is an associate director in the Department of Health for the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

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.

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones, says a well-known biblical proverb. We don't have to be practicing Christians to recognise its truth.

Elisa Granato, one of the first people to be tested for a Covid-19 vaccine, died. The news rolled in the virtual media 6 times faster than other news.[1] Keep this number in mind. This is important because, as we learn from a study published in Science, fake news spreads on average 6 times faster than genuine news. And not only faster, but also...

I clearly remember the days following the Revolution of 1989 in Romania. Whoever you met would speak about freedom: “Now we can say what we think out loud. We no longer have to whisper. We are free!”

In chaos theory, there is something that scientists call the “butterfly effect”—a seemingly insignificant event triggers a series of other events that later acquire significant importance. The butterfly effect has been used outside the realm of science as a metaphor for small things that have a considerable impact. When it comes to kindness, few things could demonstrate the butterfly effect better than the...

Whether you're a practising believer, a casual believer or, conversely, an atheist, you cannot help but be taken aback by the fact that one of the earliest images of God we have in Scripture is an unexpected one for those times: the image of God writing (Exodus 31:18).

When life takes a bad turn, we are often tempted to console ourselves with nostalgia. We begin to look at the past in a different light. We realise that we had been too demanding of ourselves, of others, of the world. That even though we had everything we needed we still wanted more. That we were always looking for something else, without paying...

Over the centuries, strong but artificial tensions have been created between the Gospel of Paul (proclaimed especially by Augustine and many Protestants) and the "legalism" of the biblical writers James, Peter, Jude, and so on, which Catholic and Orthodox theologians have usually defended. What is at stake in these tensions is the authority of God's commandments and thus the duty or obligation to...

Romantic love is easily hurt and somewhat pretentious, especially when faced with direct honesty. Friendship is more solid.

In Europe, few people know Gwyneth Paltrow as anything other than an American actress. In the United States, however, her "modern lifestyle" wellness brand called goop is growing her reputation—in a negative way.

I don’t remember ever doubting that, beyond the limits of the ensnaring, visible world, there is another reality that can only be accessed by those who speak the language of faith.

I’ll never be able to separate the memories of childhood from that of books. They intertwine like colours in fabrics, in a jumble of real and fantastical, bitter and sweet, joy and guilt.

Why can vaccinated people still get COVID-19 or even die from the disease?

“‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it’” (Amos...