Analysis

Mary was an ordinary person, just like us. The Gospel does not suggest that she had any particular merit, yet her obedience played a pivotal role in a story that would change the world.

“I knew her face better than my own. Still, I had to say goodbye. I had to walk away. That’s what you do when someone dies. Except this wasn’t just someone. It was Ana, my sweet girl.”

In order to obtain money, along with the facilities offered by specialised institutions (banks, credit unions, mutual assistance services), many people resort to a series of ad-hoc financial relations, known as “personal loans”.

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.

Lucy is an 8-year-old girl who has a range of interests broader than that of an ordinary adult. She is enrolled in an international school, where classes are taught in French by native speakers. Her classmates are children of expats from different cultures, which amuses her nanny, who, when picking her up from school, says that she "took her from the children's UN."

Love is the most beautiful and perhaps the most incomprehensible thing in the world. We find it in movies, in books, in the strength of a "yes" declared before the civil authorities, and in the embrace that binds spouses at the end of a hard day's work.

Self-sacrifice—the ability of some people to put the lives of others above their own—is not at all easy to understand.

In the maximalist search for evidence that can justify our belief and, at the same time, help us defend our reputation, something is lost: the very concept of faith.

"Logic suffers from a great logical fallacy: it believes that reality itself is of a logical nature. If it encounters something that cannot be understood logically, it will claim that this something doesn't exist, but only appears to exist..." (Lucian Blaga, Horizons and Stages)

Imagine yourself entering a shopping mall with your sunglasses on. Even though the lights are shining brightly, you cannot see them. Everything around you is dark and cold. But as soon as you remove your glasses, the world comes alive: the windows of the shops shine attractively, you see the brightly-coloured clothes, and the dazzling screen of the phone blinks with an incoming...

Their common dream was to take the Gospel to the far reaches of the earth. In the early 1950s, young men Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian were with their families in South America, working in Christian missions. The future was to bring them together in an extremely dangerous dream.

The possibility of completely rewriting the rules by which we organise our lives has always captured people's imagination. However, such a reorganisation has materialised, at best, in the pages of a philosophical book and has remained, for the most part, a utopia. But there are exceptions, of course.

When a closed window shade becomes an SOS sent by those used to living on their own but afraid of dying alone, something has fundamentally changed in a society that not long ago valued human relationships.

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful"—Samuel Johnson.

Letting go of the environment and education you received at home is difficult as it is, but can there be liberation if you grew up in a family of mobsters?