Gambling’s dark underbelly

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

Conflict: It’s Everywhere

Conflict is everywhere: in our books, movies, TV shows. But every conflict is a mere shadow of the controversy that the entire world is embroiled in.

”The coronavirus has been anything but a great equalizer.” The impact of COVID-19 on the world’s poor

A famine of biblical scale is already looming on the horizon, says David Beasley, director of the World Food Program. More than 30 developing countries could be affected by the scourge – 1 million people are already affected. It's not just people going to bed hungry, Beasley insists, explaining that it's a state of emergency where outside help is the only hope.

Pollution in our own homes is as dangerous as outdoor pollution

Air pollution is the greatest risk factor for both the environment and human health, according to the World Health Organization.

How (not) to clip the wings of reformation

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe was hit hard by several disasters, the proportions of which are difficult to imagine today.

The secrets of a successful failure

Not many management books can be read with the pleasure of reading a novel, because few are so well written. Donald Keough's book is one of those few.

The illusion of equality and other failures of reason

"Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations, that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than...

COVID-19: Helping children (and others) with viral anxiety

Even in difficult times there are many things we can do at home to help children as well as teenagers to feel less worried.

Return to meaning

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

Bewilderment

Jesus’s unpredictability is one of His most memorable traits—one that was, however, not born out of an extraordinary speculative intelligence, but out of such a different perspective on reality that even the most trained and educated thinkers could not foresee it. Therefore, Jesus’s unpredictability says more about us than about Him.

Tears, war, and tulips: a day among the Ukrainian refugees at the Siret Customs Point

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.”

Good people, bad people

I have always loved family photographs, especially old ones. They allow you to wander freely through the stories of times and lives that are little known yet also familiar.

COVID-19: Could giving up ever be the key to success?

Pray! If not to God, then to a god. Admit that we are defeated, because this is the first step towards victory.

The risks of overrelying on genetic testing

Genetic testing is a new frontier in preventive medicine. But beyond this border, there lies a minefield of trial and error.

The wonder pill

It was terrifying. They kept trying to comfort me by telling me they had the best surgeons. But they also said that I needed a new liver and that my body might reject it. – Christopher Herrera