Analysis

“And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowly turning this control thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish one,” wrote C.S. Lewis—simply through the decisions you make. If the choices we face truly carry such eternal weight, how can a Christian ensure they are making the right ones?

We all know that vitamins are good for us. Many of us take supplements to boost the supply of vitamins in our bodies. However, it wasn’t until 1912 that Polish biochemist Casimir Funk actually came up with the concept of vitamins, which he called "vital amines."

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

It is said that time makes us wiser. How wise have we become after a global pandemic with millions of deaths, a war on our borders, economic problems, and many personal tragedies in which we are caught as if in the grip of a great storm?

One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”

It's intuitively inappropriate to talk about happiness when the subject is depression. But it is even more inappropriate to talk about abnormality, inadequacy or maladjustment in the same context.

Some expectations dissolve into routine or turn into despair, while others invigorate life. The former are measured in deeds and desires, while the latter are measured in faithfulness and beliefs.

Unlike all the great founders of religions, Jesus of Nazareth is unique in both life and death, and nature and character. Only superficial researchers can consider him to be just a popular sage, a great prophet, or a revolutionary moral genius. Jesus is different from everyone, even in His birth.

The wind is blowing and it is snowing at the Siret Customs Point. Refugee groups stream by, women with children clinging to them, and the words of a little girl from another war, concluded almost eight decades ago, keep running through my mind: “And this was imprinted in my mind, that when my father is not home, it is war.”

Beyond the artistic accolades of "The Wolf of Wall Street" lies a troubling “recognition”—that of the real man who inspired the character Jordan Belfort and who, after 22 months in prison, presented his exploits in an autobiographical book.

"It was dark inside the wolf." Like a chef who reinterprets a traditional dish for an expensive urban restaurant, writer Margaret Atwood proposed to the students of her masterclass a reinterpretation of the story "Little Red Riding Hood", in line with the most current tastes and attention skills: a Little Red Riding Hood that lives in the present moment.

The holidays are a time of generosity, when those forgotten by the world meet those who want to forget that sadness exists and, out of the coexistence of the two needs, something good is born.

“…the world was not worthy of them…” (Hebrews 11:38)

Although poverty remains a part of our world, love still works wonders.

I must admit, I was a shy child. Shame is a lesson well learned. However, I don’t know if it is always correctly learned.