Keep thinking

In 2019 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the “great leap for mankind” Moon landing. It was an exciting, significant time in the history of our planet.

A financial crisis never comes alone. It brings uncertainty, fear, sleepless nights, and the shame of being unable to meet one's expenses. Can faith bring meaning amid financial chaos?

Artificial intelligence is changing the way Bible researchers approach the study of Scripture. However, this is not just a privilege reserved for specialists—it is an adventure available to anyone with an internet connection.

When I watch chicks hatch in a nest and begin to perform the instinctive behaviours of their species, I think about what we might understand about ourselves, the human species, if we had the perspective of such a privileged observer.

“Life seems short.” A seemingly simple phrase—until it comes from someone celebrating their 117th birthday, who has walked paths that stretch across three different centuries.

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

How do we value a human’s life? Should we rate lives on their value to their community? That would mean a life-saving surgeon would have more value than someone living on the street. Or is it potential—which would make a baby more valuable than a 50-year-old? What about the value we place on those later in life versus those at the end?

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

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

The great challenge facing the world’s leaders right now is identifying an optimal response to a disease bearing several characteristics that make it difficult to combat.

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

The train departs Bucharest, Romania’s “little Paris”—the old city section with beautiful architecture and impressive monuments, giving way to Communist-era apartment blocks. The plain outside the city is flat and featureless, broken now and again by a grove of trees—mysterious and impenetrable to the gaze. Decrepit houses, tattooed with graffiti, a splash of colour to contrast the uniform grey buildings, marching aimlessly past...

In 2013, famous atheist author Richard Dawkins was voted the world's leading thinker in a global poll of 10,000 people in 100 countries. Not a single thinker from the fields of religion or ethics made the list. It's worth saying again: "Think forward!"

We are living in strange times. Never before have there been so many "mentoring programmes", "transformational coaching", or "psychological methods" for sale, and never before has it been easier for them to be generated by artificial intelligence. An entire industry promises change, clarity, and discipline, but often there is no human behind these promises, only a robot.

Although a small minority deny the existence of COVID-19 (claiming that it is a malicious conspiracy), most people are interested in what they can do to be as prepared as possible for a potential encounter with the dreaded virus.