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They say self-esteem is a vital ingredient for success in life. But what if everything we were taught about self-esteem is wrong?

Forgiveness? There are wounds that seem impossible to forget, and injustices that cry out for revenge. By nature, the human heart clings to resentment and seeks balance through punishment. And yet, in the midst of pain, a force overturns human logic: the love of God.

Those familiar with the Bible know the story of the Good Samaritan, who helped a Jewish man who had been robbed by giving him first aid and paying for his recovery.

Before I even learned to read, I had already fallen in love with timeless stories. I would have loved to hear them every day. During the summer holidays, I would insist that my older sister—the one lucky enough to have already unlocked the secrets of the alphabet—read me one more story, and then another.

Historically, living together has been a response to economic and security needs rather than a virtue. However, history cannot fully explain the isolation experienced by the current generation.

An unexpected act of kindness can change a day—whether you are on the receiving end or the one who initiates it. And that change can echo far beyond a single day, because when measured by their effects, acts of kindness are never truly small, despite the language we use to describe them.

I was standing in the supermarket queue, pushing my daughter in her pushchair, when a man well past his prime wearing camouflage trousers gave her a long look. Then he turned to me, as if continuing a conversation about parenting we'd started long ago, and said, "You know, this little girl is going to heal a lot of things in you."

If you’re reading this article in July of 2024, there’s a good chance I already have climbed or am currently climbing Wave Rock. Called Katter Kich in the Nyungar dialect, Wave Rock is an enormous granite cliff face in the shape of—you guessed it—a wave that protrudes from the surface of the earth in the middle of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt. It forms the...

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

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.

“Everything is finite—except pain.” (Mihai Eminescu, Reflections)

It happens to all of us: we feel the warmth of a song or the peace of prayer and have the sense that God’s love is there, alive and near. But true love does not stop at emotion. It asks to be expressed in concrete ways, shaping the choices and actions of everyday life.

Being a parent means, among other things, engaging in agonising negotiations to keep the supermarket aisles relatively quiet and the shopping trolley from overflowing with sweets. Some are successfully concluded. Others, a real failure. Although we are very adept at recognising a spoiled child on the street, we have a much harder time spotting the signs in our own children. After all, what...

Gentle parenting—how did this seemingly wholesome phrase come to elicit such strong negative reactions as contempt, sarcasm, and condescension?

The misinformation crisis affecting older adults is real, well-documented and growing. Here's what the studies say about how to tackle it.