Analysis

For me, 2022 was the year of waiting—a word that managed to define our lives, thoughts and actions to an unexpected degree.

The year 1989 changed not only the countries of the former communist bloc but also the world. From a geopolitical, economic, cultural, and religious standpoint, 1989 was a watershed year that changed the meaning of international relations, with direct effects on all areas of life.

As the crisis caused by the new coronavirus deepened and spread, it was to be expected that the phenomenon would be framed in apocalyptic terms. It is something that tends to occur in such contexts.

If we had to choose a star among vitamins, a star similar to the celebrities that electrify the world of people, vitamin D would have a very high chance of occupying the podium.

"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...

I was a sickly child. If I wasn’t catching a humble cold, it was something more exotic, like whooping cough or bronchitis.

What do you imagine heaven will be like? American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously said, “For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” Although I love Jesus, I think I am a bit afraid of getting bored there too. There’s a prevailing picture of heaven as being some sort of suspended animation, which may play into this.

For 23 years, every working day, Kevin Briggs went to work knowing that someone might try to end their life right in front of him. What can you say or do for a person standing on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump?

From an early age, we are bombarded with messages telling us to stand out, to make something of ourselves, to do something great with our lives. Many times the voices are religious in nature: God has great plans for us, He will do truly remarkable things with our lives.

The TV-series Friends was recently reviewed in The New York Times as “enormously easy to watch”. This characteristic however does not make the show unique, nor can it account for its popularity today, more than 15 years since its final episode.

We sometimes find ourselves surprised by how other people think about moral issues—how they distinguish right from wrong and choose to do what they think is right.

Even if our "relationship with work" is often a complicated one, about which we do not always have the best feelings, we should remember that our jobs are more than just sources of income.

Life is a stage that we enter without a script, although we are constantly influenced by forces of varying visibility: social, educational, religious, economic, and political.

In the famous realist novel A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe blends the factual with the imaginary, describing the social context just before the great plague struck London in 1665. Among the reactions described, two straddle the line between religion and conspiracy.

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside.