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The fascination of the universe of childhood, with its multitude of stories, experiences and impressions, is unrepeatable. As adults, however, we are often unaware that monsters may lurk in the shards of that magical past, hidden among dreams, memories and kites, ready to reactivate and injure us, while simultaneously anaesthetising us with a familiar sense of déjà vu.

After a chance meeting of mutual friends, I was introduced to Tim and Sonia in a restaurant in central Toowoomba, Queensland, eight days before their home was washed away.

To have willpower does not mean saying you want to do something, it means to actually be doing it—André Maurois

Years of prosperity swallowed up in a few months of recession—that's how you could sum up the global economic crisis that began in 2007. At its core, the worst recession since the interwar period turned out to be a mirror into which none of us want to look.

Fire falling from the sky. A massive tsunami. An abandoned city. Let’s be real—it’s probably Los Angeles or New York (although sometimes Sydney or Hong Kong makes a cameo). These are the images we most often associate with the end of the world. Whatever comes to mind for you, no doubt it has been shaped in large part by literature, art and, of...

What guarantees do we have that the texts from which modern translations of the Bible were made reflect the original?

The wind is blowing and it is snowing at the Siret Customs Point. Refugee groups stream by, women with children clinging to them, and the words of a little girl from another war, concluded almost eight decades ago, keep running through my mind: “And this was imprinted in my mind, that when my father is not home, it is war.”

Procrastination is self-harm, psychologist Piers Steel says. A kind of self-harm that we can become addicted to if we do not detect the reasons behind it and especially the effective strategies to counter it.

Problem gambling in Australia and New Zealand is an issue seldom talked about, but we ignore it at our peril.

While few people can remember the details of their first hit, everyone can identify with the rush of satisfaction, the tingling delight that starts on the tip of your tongue and then courses through your entire body.

Any large-scale phenomenon, such as a pandemic, activates our instinct to preserve our state of being—especially when we feel like we are losing it.

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.

I doubt there’s a person who hasn’t heard of the Boston Marathon bombing, which took the lives of three people. As runners entered the home straight, with the finish line in sight, first one then another explosion ripped through the happy, watching throng.

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...

Little over a decade ago, a highly acclaimed British documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux, stepped into the midst of 500 paedophiles admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Coalinga, California, trying to find out if the complex treatment the convicts had to go through was really working.