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"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?

But why do our ambitions of self-improvement rarely stick the way we hope they will?

"Who were the two artists of ancient times who competed to see who could paint the visible world most faithfully? 'Now I shall prove to you that I am the best,' said the first, showing the other a curtain which he had painted. 'Well, draw back the curtain,' said the adversary, 'and let us see the picture.' 'The curtain is the picture,' replied...

"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...

Fairy tales begin with the words "Once upon a time", which automatically send us into a timeless world of fantasy, imagination, and daydreaming.

The daily horoscope is sometimes seen as a quasi-scientific method of predicting the future, other times as a preoccupation of childish adults, a way of calming one’s curiosity about tomorrow.

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.

Loss begets pain, but pain is not one-size-fits-all, so there are no recovery methods that work in all situations. We do have at hand, however, explanatory models of pain, studies that dismantle myths about grief and, above all, "a psychological immune system" that helps us recover from painful experiences.

The world of the homeless is the darker side of our world. It is inhabited by vagrants, drug addicts, and the powerless. This world has its own rules, customs, pleasures, and pains, but lacks meaning and peace. And those who enter this world struggle to leave it.

Even though we have been in a much better place for 700 years now, we know that the passing of time has not eliminated the instinct of persecution from human nature.

Soviet soldier Bakhretdin Khakimov was declared missing in action during the war in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 15,000 USSR soldiers and more than a million Afghans. Thirty-three years later, his family found out he was alive, living as a true Afghan among his former enemies.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death... It cannot be overemphasised, however, that no changes in behavior or technology can save us unless we can achieve control over the size of the human population." Despite seeming to come from a dystopian novel, these ideas belong to biologist...

In the movie A Beautiful Mind, there is a scene in which the brilliant mathematician John Nash reveals how he manages to function, despite the schizophrenia that has tormented him for years. “I still see things that are not there,” said Nash, “I just choose not to acknowledge them. Like a diet of the mind, I just choose not to indulge certain appetites.”

Let the one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on their God. – Isaiah 50:10

My brother and I were thrashing through the bush en-route to a peak overlooking Airlie Beach in far North Queensland. A short hike that was only meant to be 800 metres seemed to go on forever. We stopped every person returning from the lookout to enquire about how much longer it would take for us to get there. “Oh just another 10 minutes,”...