Top

Two thousand years ago, Jesus asked us to remember the Lord's supper. What made it so special?

On 29 May 2023, photographer Oleksandr Kuchynskyi filmed a group of children in Kiev fleeing to a shelter during an air raid.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” said Nietzsche in one of his essays back in 1889. Easier said than done when you’re facing unemployment, illness, rejection, or a blank exam paper. We tend to see these as things we need to get rid of. This can’t possibly be the life we wanted.

Time can exist in many forms—work time, free time, leisure time—and it has a lot of possessive adjectives: my time, your time, our time. The relativity of time can often lead to confusion because of the accompanying mixture of emotions, such as fear, joy, satisfaction, or expectation. It was this relativity of time that led me to need to define it in my...

One of the most powerful pieces of literature illustrating the proper preparation for a financial crisis comes from antiquity. More precisely, from the Bible.

Elspeth Muir’s brother, Alexander, died from drowning. It was 2009, and he had just turned 21. He died from drowning, but his death “was not foreshadowed by his love of water except that it explains why he was near a river, alone, with a blood-alcohol content of almost 0.25. My brother died because he was drunk, and because the drink made him stupid.”

When it comes to conspiracy theories, the public quickly becomes polarised. On one hand, you have the “experts” who reel off reliable information with credible arguments from confirmed cases. On the other hand, there are the “uninformed,” completely disinterested in the subject or outright rejecting it as a myth.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. – Emily Dickinson

This coronavirus crisis has, for me, some perplexing parallels with a well-known incident narrated in the Gospel of Matthew (14:22-33). The disciples are confined in a little boat in the middle of a terrible storm, almost as we are confined at home today by the emergency laws of our countries.

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

“So, is it like Monopoly?” The response is often amusing when a family member, friend or acquaintance discovers I’m “into board games”. Most are taken aback, shocked that an otherwise seemingly well-adjusted adult man would find so much enjoyment in a children’s hobby.

The Colorado beetle that threatened the potato crop of the former GDR in 1950 might have been an American method of sabotage against the Eastern bloc. A sinister German plot might have been the cause of the Spanish flu. Perhaps AIDS emerged as a biological weapon developed by the United States and has been tested on prisoners and minorities. Every crisis humanity has...

Whether we see ourselves or not as living collections of our habits, we know from experience that, once formed, our habits are not as malleable as we would like them to be.

I’ll never be able to separate the memories of childhood from that of books. They intertwine like colours in fabrics, in a jumble of real and fantastical, bitter and sweet, joy and guilt.