Faith is not an insurance policy whose terms we are unclear about until we need to consult it; it is the heartbeat of a life passionately lived for God.

A strange dichotomy is in play in our management of risk. In public life, assessments are made with bewildering regularity over the probability of something going wrong, whether it be in laying on single events or making lasting strategy.

Extroverts and introverts together give groups balance and harmony.  Why then does the western world increasingly favour one type over the other?

In today’s debate about identity and the many forms it may take, little attention is given to personality, yet it shapes how we relate to the world as assuredly as any other. 

In applying common sense to the bigger issues of life we lull ourselves into a dangerous complacency; the gift of wisdom is offered by God to protect us from these lapses.

The prevalent and unassailable refrain: ‘it’s common sense, isn’t it?’ usually puts an end to conversation on any given topic.  To dispute common sense is to invite a question ......

Middle age is a crucial developmental phase in which people often mellow into fruitfulness or sour into discontentment. And there is immense social pressure for this to be the latter.

I’ll admit it: two days before Christmas in 2012 I will hit fifty.  It’s no big deal, even if the way we measure numbers suggests otherwise.  On reaching forty, the first person I opened the ......

Will China really rule the world in the twenty first century?
According to projections made by Goldman Sachs, the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the US economy by 2025 and by 2050 almost twice its size.  The magnitude of a national economy is usually a predicate of its global influence so we might expect China to be calling the shots in due course. 

Is humanitarian warfare a contradiction in terms or a necessary component of a civilised world?

It is now more or less two decades since the appalling Bosnian war and the genocide in Rwanda, which scarred the complacent post-Cold War world with the enduring barbarity of the human race. 

The discipline of withholding what we are thinking is not simply the hypocrisy some would have us believe; the circuit-breaker between brain and tongue is one guarantor of social harmony.

Middle class manners are a staple of modern social commentary and they are skewered with malicious intent in Roman Polanski’s latest film ‘Carnage’. 

Who is brave enough to let the boredom they feel speak to them rather than trying to suppress it?  Those who do may just be the recipients of a rich spiritual encounter

In case you were wondering, April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in the last century; this valuable piece of information was discovered by a computer programmer using a specially ......

Both society and the Church are uneasy talking about the role of luck in life.  More honesty about its effects might help us address the injustices about which God cares.

If you are smart, you will convince people that your successes in life are deserved and your failures just bad luck.  Listening to any Premier League manager after a game of football is ......

Just because we see Jesus for who he is does not mean we see ourselves for who we are or the world around us for what it is.  Our vision is peppered with blind spots we need to talk more about.

The concept of spiritual blindness has informed our understanding of the Gospel from the start.  St. Paul said: ‘the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers,

Though we decry the loss of memory, we have to forget some of our past in order to function as God intends; but what if our environment stops us from forgetting? 

It is an easy assumption to make that, among the trillions of pages of online data which will be posted in our lifetime, stuff about us personally will go unnoticed. 

Mobile footage of the end of tyrants makes for compelling TV and leaves the sour aftertaste of voyeurism in the mouth

It was the first image of its kind to lodge in the imagination of this generation.  The recently executed body, with its disfigured face, was nonetheless recognisably the tyrant whom millions had feared