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Imagine yourself entering a shopping mall with your sunglasses on. Even though the lights are shining brightly, you cannot see them. Everything around you is dark and cold. But as soon as you remove your glasses, the world comes alive: the windows of the shops shine attractively, you see the brightly-coloured clothes, and the dazzling screen of the phone blinks with an incoming...

The stakes are high when it comes to identifying the one to whom we should pray, and we can discover who by answering an apparently simple question: Can we expect prayers to be heard no matter who we address them to?

Children have big feelings. Even worse, children have big feelings over what seem to be rather inconsequential things.

I request from my colleagues at the ST.N editorial office at least three sources for news and at least two books for the analysis topics: one for and one against. Ideally, the reading of the first two books will give rise to the desire to look for at least two more, so that the differences are clearer. After that, there will be a...

“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

After a chance meeting of mutual friends, I was introduced to Tim and Sonia in a restaurant in central Toowoomba, Queensland, eight days before their home was washed away.

I have always loved family photographs, especially old ones. They allow you to wander freely through the stories of times and lives that are little known yet also familiar.

The face muscles relax, and the eyes become empty before boredom urges them to seek another centre of interest. The restlessness culminates with some leaving and others immersing themselves in the exploration of their phones. Others seek to divert the discussion with a joke or hasten its end through a detached or ostentatious silence.

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.

Happiness is . . . ? How would you finish the sentence? What do you think happiness is? Positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, says it is is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

When confronted with someone else’s strong emotions—intense joy or heartbreaking pain—we often do not know how to react. In the case of joy, the other person usually doesn't mind, because his feelings console him. But in the case of pain, things are completely different. Misunderstood suffering can make the sufferer isolate himself from the very people who could help him. So, how can...

George R.R. Martin surely struck gold when he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire.

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.

A lack of conflict is not necessarily a sign of spiritual maturity, as some Christians might be tempted to believe. The way in which we manage conflict says a lot about how we understand the role of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation in a sinful world.

"Millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterises our time." (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970)