Social

In an ideal world, everything would be simple: you, as the father or mother, tell your child, the apple of your eye, to do something and, being perfectly obedient and submissive, they do as they’re told. However, we don’t know if such a world would really be ideal. Nevertheless, for many parents, this resembles a paradise to which they would love to escape...

Hope can be palpable and elusive at the same time, both reasonable and independent of logic. Yet this independence from logic is not synonymous with indifference to reason, but a victory over it. Hope has its own logic, one that changes lives for the better.

Before I started looking for the meaning of life, I thought I had already found it. Or, that it had been given to me. In the world I came from, the road was clearly laid out. My life's major events were all mapped out, and precious little was negotiable.

"All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature" through the decisions you make, wrote CS Lewis. If the choices we make really have such an impact, how can Christians make sure they make the right decisions?

When I was four years old, my younger brother was born. My parents focused on my brother and spent less time with me. It was only 40 years later that I discovered how this had affected me.

Fundamentalist movements, extremist and sectarian religious beliefs, manipulations of the mass of believers, conspiracy theories within religious sects, and other such threats, emphasise the need for critical thinking.

The midlife crisis can cause an unpleasant shudder to those approaching this stage, a stage supposedly marked by anxiety, depression, a reassessment of life, disillusionment and the painful experience of all the internal and external changes that are taking place. But what if, despite the critical changes, midlife is a time of growth and joy rather than a succession of crises?

Romantic love is easily hurt and somewhat pretentious, especially when faced with direct honesty. Friendship is more solid.

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.”

We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.

When I look at the lives of some people, I can't help but wonder if they are cut from a different cloth to most of us. Their courage in the face of challenges, their resilience, their vision and their achievements are so impressive that my imagination wonders what the world would look like if their passion were multiplied.

More than 19 years ago, the Netherlands experimented with legalising prostitution, an approach that many countries looked at with interest and curiosity. After all, after the failure of the "noble experiment" of American prohibition, people wanted to see the result of the opposite approach with regards to sex.

The appeal to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is an error in thinking which argues that a conclusion is true because there is no evidence against it, or that a conclusion is false because there is no evidence in its favour.

"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)

And they lived happily ever after. This sentence closes many of the stories we often read in just a few minutes. In reality, between the beginning and end of a love story lie years of experiences and events which, at times, can be more difficult than they seem.