Books

As Christians, we learn that we must offer love and devote ourselves to the needs of those around us. However, in life, there are times when we feel overwhelmed by what others ask of us. We feel that some people take advantage of us—our kindness, our time, or our availability. We would like to refuse certain people or tasks that are assigned to...

Did you wrestle with your decision to have children? Or did you know motherhood was for you from a long time back? More than six years ago, I found myself wondering about children. I couldn’t really find a “point” to having children. “Underpinning all of these [ideas] was the knowledge that the world is overpopulated and under-resourced,” I had written.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), author of The Cost of Discipleship and one of the remarkable figures of twentieth-century Christianity, served as a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Tübingen, Berlin, and New York, in a dark period of human history. He vehemently opposed the Nazi Party's attempt to subjugate the church to the political and ideological approach of the time. He felt the political and...

At the age of nine, the young Dante Alighieri fell hopelessly in love with Beatrice Portinari, a young woman of about the same age, whose image would haunt him for the rest of his life and inspire one of the most famous female characters in universal literature.

"In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England," testified C.S. Lewis in his book, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Today’s article, however, is about another book from the same author, Mere Christianity.

"A Time to Forgive" is the story of a pilgrimage through the void of pain and trauma. A father, devastated by the enormity of his loss, struggles to forgive his daughter's killer.

"The Clifford Goldstein story" is addressed to those who, ever so often, feel the need to read something about experimentation, because it is not about theorising a rebellious young man's search for the path of life, but rather a true-life story.

I love Christmas, and opening Nathan Brown’s book, Advent: Hearing the Good News in the Story of Jesus’ Birth, reading each page, is like opening a carefully wrapped Christmas present, undoing the gift card attached with ribbon and bow, folding back the bright cellophane wrapping and lifting the lid off a curious little box containing the Gift itself. The gift in this case...

The readers who immerse themselves in the maze of paper and ink, savouring every word, seem to be on the verge of extinction.

The book written by John Ortberg, All the Places to Go... How Will You Know? invites us to reflect on the discerning of God’s will for our lives.

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...

Bruce Reichenbach's book, Divine Providence: God’s Love and Human Freedom is impressive first of all due to the author’s total disinterest in impressing his readers. Instead, he has a legacy to pass on.

Oswald Chambers’ devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, has a remarkable circulation and is considered probably the most well-known and beloved Christian devotional. It was first published in 1927 in the United Kingdom and has been in print ever since. It has been officially translated into 39 languages, with over 13 million copies sold.

Life is not just a very cool gift. It is something that a person receives on loan from God. That's the conclusion of Oscar, the child hero of "Oscar and the Lady in Pink," a novel written by Franco-Belgian playwright, short story writer, and novelist Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

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.