Analysis

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.

Education is essential for the survival of any social group, since a community ensures its existence and development only by passing on to the next generation the knowledge it has accumulated, the power it derives from it and its ideological aspirations.

Religious people believe in the positive results of their faith in God. There is a common expectation that faithful people will lead good, healthy lives, while bad people will experience trouble, illness and punishments. The reality, however, is much more complex and often contradicts such expectations. How useful is religious faith when it comes to health, or the healing of the sick?

Jason Padgett was exactly as one would expect someone who has no interest in school to be. He was only interested in parties and bars and was a magnet for both fun and trouble. That’s how he ended up being expelled, which didn’t affect him too much. However, getting beaten savagely changed his life forever, in the most unimaginable way possible.

Dr Kendra Haloviak-Valentine, Professor of New Testament at La Sierra University in Redlands, California, comes from a family with a tradition of theology and research.

At some point, we've all come across the phrase "back in my day," a deeply subjective expression which encapsulates a universal phenomenon: the generation gap.

John Andrews and his family decided to cross the ocean against the current of that time. Therefore, many forgotten truths were brought to light, many hopes were reborn, and many dreams came true.

Louis Zamperini experienced the bizarre smell of death so many times that he came to the verge of losing his mind. However, he survived, and by choosing to forgive the unforgivable, he was able to breathe life into an entire world.

It was 1984 when hospitals in southern China were besieged by young people in a state of extreme agitation. Thousands of people, of both sexes, were suffering from panic attacks accompanied by fear of death because of the overwhelming belief that their sexual organs were retracting and disappearing, or that their nipples were retracting into their breasts.

She is an old age pensioner living across the street from my house. But I very rarely meet her. For years she has stayed in her house because of the many serious health problems she has been struggling with.

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!”

I love Christmas, and opening Nathan Brown’s book, Advent: Hearing the Good News in the Story of Jesus’ Birth, reading each page, is like opening a carefully wrapped Christmas present, undoing the gift card attached with ribbon and bow, folding back the bright cellophane wrapping and lifting the lid off a curious little box containing the Gift itself. The gift in this case...

The midlife crisis can cause an unpleasant shudder to those approaching this stage, a stage supposedly marked by anxiety, depression, a reassessment of life, disillusionment and the painful experience of all the internal and external changes that are taking place. But what if, despite the critical changes, midlife is a time of growth and joy rather than a succession of crises?

The epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch thinks that social distancing will have to continue, in one way or another, hopefully in milder forms and in correlation with other activities. Lipsitch is the author of a study suggesting that social distancing may be necessary, possibly intermittently, until 2022.

Pietism was a movement of spiritual revival that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries mainly in Germany and Bohemia.