Psychology

In the February 2023 issue of Signs of the Times, I wrote an article titled Gambling’s Dark Underbelly. Here in Australia, gambling is a multi-billion-dollar industry with a few very rich winners and millions of losers. In the article I concluded that “Gambling in any form is designed to bleed you for as long as you’re willing to bleed, with no regard for...

Next to family and health, friends are among the top reasons that make us happy. But what if we are solitary, recluse or shy?

"Loneliness irritates me like a broken nail," says a line in a Romanian poem. The truth is, loneliness stings, pulls apart, and resembles the coffee dregs left at the bottom of the pot in which joy and love once brewed. Although the fear of loneliness is natural, we can choose to see solitude as something more than a "flowering wilderness" and embrace it...

A friend carries within him our identity’s safe box.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross” (Heb. 12: 2 NIV).

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.

"You? Fat? No way!" "With all due respect, officer, that wasn't a red light!" Every day, billions of lies leave the mouths of billions of people. Lying is a moral pollution that we declare harmful, but seem to believe is indispensable in life.

The promise to live with our loved one “until death do us part" has gradually lost its meaning. Today, it is considered unrealistic to get married with the idea that the relationship will last forever.

Some psychologists fear that religion erodes self-esteem. Some believers fear that self-esteem endangers salvation. Who is right?

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. – C.S. Lewis

Related to the subject of boredom, Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was 4 years old, and didn't read until he was 7. His parents thought he was mentally disabled, and one of the teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and denied admission to the Zurich Polytechnic.

“To be fearless may be a gift. However, the most precious one is, probably, the courage resulting from developing the habit of not allowing fear to dictate your actions”, says the renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy activist in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, in her essay titled “Free from fear”.

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

Can the thinking of a single philosopher be so influential as to change the fundamental values ​​of a society and lead to tremors of transcontinental proportions, like the economic crisis that began in 2007? Could Ayn Rand's philosophy be the almost-imperceptible reason for transforming the United States, as Levine puts it, into a "selfish nation"?