The war with Bacchus

On 17 January 1920, America officially "dried up". It wasn't a shortage of water or a prolonged drought, but a law banning the sale, transport, and commercial production of alcohol.

New Year’s resolutions: a tradition doomed to failure?

Besides carefree days, Christmas carols and traditional sweet breads, any respectable December also includes an evaluation of the achievements of the previous year and making plans for the future.

The (un)expected Messiah

“God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours—so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”[1](Corrie ten Boom)

A plea for leisure

"What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare." — from the poem "Leisure" by William H. Davies.

Forgiveness heals the one who forgives

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. – C.S. Lewis

Who Am I?

I guess my mid-life crisis kicked off when I turned 26. What is my purpose in life? What have I accomplished so far? Am I caught in a treadmill of mediocrity? Who am I? Am I basically a good person or a selfish person? Do I have a destiny? These kinds of questions have a way of recycling themselves—they turned up again around my 31st birthday,...

The most misunderstood of loves

To understand the love of God, we are encouraged to look at the Cross. The unnatural position of the Son, nailed to a non-existent guilt, raises a storm of questions in the other children of God. The most disturbing of them, I think, would be: What kind of love is this?

Having the courage to be a stepparent

In the whole array of virtues that a stepparent must possess in order to succeed in raising a well-rounded child whose world has been shattered by the separation of his or her parents, courage is only mentioned in passing. Yet courage is the foundation of a construction that promises to be challenging from the outset, say those who have plunged into the role...

The end of drugs?

In mid-April 2014, the words 'scandal', 'secret', 'drugs', and 'Roche' (the Swiss drug giant) delighted the medical press, which was quick to publish tantalizing news about the ineffectiveness of Tamiflu and the enormous amounts spent by governments in order to stock up on the drug, in preparation for possible flu epidemics.

The social media trap

Two recent stories in Australian media shocked me to my core. Two 12-year-olds in different states took their own lives after being bullied at school. 

The effect of our consumption on the planet is irreversible

We have introduced so much carbon dioxide into nature's operating system that we no longer know "what is an act of God and what is an act of man" when it comes to natural disasters striking with increasing frequency and overwhelming power, says Nathan Lewis, a chemistry and energy specialist at the California Institute of Technology.

The pretext of ignorance is sold in different styles

Atheist evolutionists accuse Christians of offering explanations that blame everything on God when they have no other answer. In other words, God has become a pretext for ignorance. Without denying the fact that sometimes this is true, reality also has other facets.

The Ten: Incredible children in the Bible

With God's help, little guys can do big things too...

Forgiving a Nazi

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.

The Holocaust and the maths of an absurd history

This year, Yom Hashoah,[1] or Holocaust Remembrance Day, begins on the evening of April 27th, and ends on April 28th, at sunset. In Israel, entertainment venues are closed from sunset to sunset, sirens sound long, and the six traditional torches are lit, a symbol of the nearly 6 million people who perished in the atrocities of World War II.