Education

Every day, we are surrounded by the resilience of developing characters and it’s almost impossible not to be touched by their beauty and fragility.

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." (C. S. Lewis)

There have always been people who relish a debate—though all too often, even when the subject hardly matters, the whole exercise amounts to little more than intellectual gymnastics in a thimble and scholarly squabbles over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

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...

I love books as much as I love people, but if I’m honest with myself, sometimes I find a little more comfort in the company of books than in the presence of my fellow humans.

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

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.

In A History of Young People in the West, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt posit that, in the West, adolescence is first and foremost a social-cultural construction, and therefore a cultural product. They considered it at most subsidiarily as a stage in the physiological process of growing up.

The book "Sometimes I Don't Feel Like Praying" is a hall of mirrors. It strips you of religious clichés and the trappings of spiritual practices that mask a dysfunctional Christianity. It reveals spiritual failures that are hard to admit. Above all, however, it is an extremely useful tool for Christians for whom the concept of grace remains largely unexplored.

Most of us want to trust. We assume that others possess our own level of honesty and goodwill. Sadly, this is neither a sensible nor a safe attitude anymore.

“In the works of Comenius one feels that a prophet is speaking; he was indeed a colossal figure, but only in recent years have his ideas received the respect they merit”.

"One Thousand Gifts" describes the beautiful revolt of a soul that does not want to be crippled by what it has lost, but to pierce its own suffering like an arrow springing from the bow of grace, a leitmotif of the whole book.

Want to start the new school year on the right foot? Here are some back-to-school tips that will help make that transition from holidays to school a lot easier.

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books." (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British poet)

Roberto Badenas is a Seventh-day Adventist who specialises in Bible studies and is a New Testament teacher, with a theological leadership career that reflects his concern for people.