What do we do with bad people?
“Can’t good people teach bad people to be good?” Madeleine asked her mother, with the innocence of a seven-year-old.
In the arms of the coach
What can you do in the face of a terrible diagnosis, which condemns you to life in a wheelchair? What can you choose besides despair or resignation? Kayla chose to run.
Most wanted words | Friendship and edifying conversations
The face muscles relax, and the eyes become empty before boredom urges them to seek another centre of interest. The restlessness culminates with some leaving and others immersing themselves in the exploration of their phones. Others seek to divert the discussion with a joke or hasten its end through a detached or ostentatious silence.
People who face tragedies with eyes wide open
When faced with great tragedies, the most overwhelming feeling is one of helplessness. What can we do to change the lives of the hurting for the better? How can we help when not even the strong can find solutions? The answer is not simple, but it is more accessible than we might believe if it includes empathy, courage, and the faith that any...
The boy who didn’t believe in ‘impossible’
We know their stories, or we think we know them. Theirs are stories of success that earn the admiration of the entire world. We see the moment of victory and wish we could be in the place of the victorious ones, without realising the effort and sacrifice that are behind that moment of glory. If we truly grasped this, we might become more...
Colour you happy
Happiness is . . . ? How would you finish the sentence? What do you think happiness is? Positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, says it is is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
“The woman with the book” | The weakness that unleashes the power of God
God uses the traits we dislike as well as our weaknesses to create something great, beyond our abilities and imagination. This is the message that pervades the pages of "The Woman with the Book", the biography of the missionary Gladys Aylward.
All or nothing
By the middle of the 17th century, German Protestantism had long ceased to be a burning torch. Accepted by the nobility and the populace, it had become an ecclesiastical, secular, and politicised institution like all the others. In the night of alienation, God brought from the ashes the light of a new dawn.
Practising faith
When I was at high school, I played basketball a lot—most days at school, then team training sessions and often two or three games each week. At university, I played on the best team I have been part of. We trained and competed regularly over two years, and twice won our league championship.
The marathon runner with a mission
Dr Delbert Baker is an African-American pastor, writer, teacher, and former president of Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama, a historically Black Seventh-day Adventist institution of higher learning. The conversation with Dr Baker took place in Nairobi, Kenya. With Kenya being the country of marathon runners, much of the discussion was about the races he participated in and their remarkable results.
The Church of England | Anglicanism between Rome and Geneva
The term "Anglicanism" denotes the system of doctrine and practice of those Christians who are in communion with the archbishop of Canterbury. The beginnings of the Church of England are linked to the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI, while the initial formulation of Anglican principles is linked to the reign of Elizabeth I, during whose reign a middle ground was politically...
I shall not hate
Izzeldin Abuelaish wrote a book titled I Shall Not Hate, now translated into 13 languages, about the hatred that led to the death of his daughters. "Hate is a poison, a fire which burns you from the inside," he writes.
Jesus’s atypical vocabulary
From the speech of Jesus, who was a perfect speaker, we would expect there to be no fiery insults or harsh terms.
The counterfeit motif in the apocalyptic scenario
There is a lot of talk today about the fact that things are not what they seem. It is not easy to distinguish between conspiratorially motivated speculation, and the real hidden things of our world—but most of the time the sources make the difference.


























