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It is crucial to realise that while words can be seductive and magnetic, they can also put us in great danger if we let ourselves be carried away by their charms, driven by emotional impulses without reason.

The effect or influence that a particular thing has on us depends largely on where that thing falls on the scale of our values. It's one thing to lose your folding fan in a foreign country and quite another to lose your passport.

“The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee, who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God.”

On the pedestal of history, holding the flame of freedom—that's how the Book of Daniel has stood since it first appeared, more than 2500 years ago, and how it continues to stand today. It is a divinely inspired introduction to the book of Revelation, and together they represent the extension of the gospel beyond the apostolic generation up until the return of Christ,...

The miracle of modern technology today is idealised by almost everyone. The way in which technology has placed the world at our feet, ensuring that we are at the centre of the universe even while lying on our couches, and that we find solutions simply by swiping our finger along a screen, has irredeemably conquered us.

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside. 

Among the greatest disappointments of life is having our expectations unfulfilled; not by politicians, or publications that promote false news or weather forecasts, but by those close to us—people in whom we have invested our confidence.

“I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me” (Habakkuk 2:1).

Paris, November 13, 2015. A European capital is badly hit by fundamentalists who legitimise their crimes by using a holy name: an impactful event that shocked the whole world. It is neither the first nor, unfortunately, the last tragedy whose consequences on the general public have become the subject of analysis on social media.

“Am I still human if I’m afraid?” The question asked by a well-known fictional character can be the starting point for reflecting on how we learn to live with our fears.

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.

Life is a stage that we enter without a script, although we are constantly influenced by forces of varying visibility: social, educational, religious, economic, and political.

To know God is an aspiration inherent in the rational being who recognises His existence.

I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

In my humble but literary-educated opinion, Tim Winton is Australia’s finest living novelist. Since winning publication of his first novel in a competition for young writers in 1981, he has had 10 more novels published, as well as collections of stories, plays, books for younger readers and a handful of non-fiction works. Winton has won Australia’s top literary prize—the Miles Franklin Award—on four...