Analysis

“Life seems short.” A seemingly simple phrase—until it comes from someone celebrating their 117th birthday, who has walked paths that stretch across three different centuries.

Not many years ago, in Romania, the internet was perceived by a large share of middle-aged and older adults as an innovation primarily for the young—a space where they played games and communicated electronically.

The portrait of a good listener contains skills that are formed over time, through an honest interaction with others, motivated by the desire to understand and help them.

When I read “The Pitesti Phenomenon”, in my teens, I was bewildered by how cruel human nature can be. It was also then that I realized that being forced to renounce yourself, to bury your values and defining beliefs to become the reflection of a rotten system, to become inhuman is worse than being physically tortured.

When you are addicted to alcohol, the whole of society is your enemy: TV shows, their commercials, your neighbours in your free time, the family at big holiday gatherings, entire aisles in shops that convey the message that "you'll feel better if you drink alcohol".

People can’t live on bread alone. They also need hope.

In talking to pastor Cristian Modan, the religion teacher and chaplain at Mihai Ionescu School in Bucharest, I wanted to find out how we should teach children to communicate with God.

Many people know the Lord’s Prayer, having learned it from a parent or grandparent. But few know that it was given as a response to the disciples’ request for Jesus to teach them how to pray.

“Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

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.

What if we could modify or even completely erase painful, sad, or traumatic memories? While this concept currently belongs to the realm of science fiction, advances in science may soon make memory modification possible. Yet, experts remain divided on one fundamental question: could the potential benefits of altering memories outweigh the risks involved?

At the end of a journey tracing how the belief and hope in the Second Coming of Jesus have manifested themselves in the two-thousand-year history of Christianity, the final part of The Second Coming Files presents the remaining elements that link that history to the present day: the Millerite movement and Adventism.

George R.R. Martin surely struck gold when he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire.

In centuries long buried in the mists of time, the Bible was a book for which people were willing to die—whether burned at the stake or thrown into prison. There was a time when Bibles were chained to monastery walls. Today, they are printed and distributed by the millions. Yet it seems fewer people are actually reading them.

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.