Analysis

Holiday greetings are a nice custom, but they are also an opportunity to assess how much we care about each other, how much we have grown closer or, on the contrary, how much we have grown apart over the past year.

When I'm tired I can't love! Many times I have lived this reality and even assessed it as the exact end of love.

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.

Conspiracy theories and fake news are not the same thing, although the two categories have much in common.

Jeddah is different, at least according to its city motto. This Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea is home to more than 4 million people and is a gateway to Mecca: the holiest city in Islam. Millions of pilgrims come through Jeddah to visit Mecca, some 65 kilometres to the east, and Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, 360km to the north.

Doctor Roland Hermann knows what he wants to do with his life. This is the explanation that best describes his decisive yet relaxed and simple answers. For years, the 45-year-old dentist from Mediaș, Romania, has been travelling to forgotten places to treat hundreds and thousands of disadvantaged patients.

We are so familiar with complaining that we don't even recognise its presence in our interactions. It has become part of us—and, according to rumours on the internet, so have its consequences. The whining we are told we do every minute of every conversation has the power to destroy our neurons.

In one sense, it was hardly an unusual story: a big-budget Hollywood war movie with a big-name director and famous actors, featuring long and ultra-violent action sequences, with heroes and enemies.

Making any choice denies the possibility of at least one other choice. When confronted with this truth, young people often find themselves unprepared for life’s big choices.

Parents have a crucial role in managing their children's digital behaviour, as well as preventing and detecting addiction. Their success depends on their own relationship with digital devices.

The red horizons are shattered. But much more subtle dangers loom for the present and the future. In most Christian countries, theology has declared a truce with evolutionary atheology and has devised a foolish and deadly compromise that is neither atheism nor true Christianity.

Soviet soldier Bakhretdin Khakimov was declared missing in action during the war in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 15,000 USSR soldiers and more than a million Afghans. Thirty-three years later, his family found out he was alive, living as a true Afghan among his former enemies.

For the crowds gathered around the casket containing the relics of Saint Paraskeva, everything is just dream and faith. Amazingly much faith. There is also something else. There is the hope of a miracle, a miracle that will cure diseases, cover debts, and make life happy.

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

"Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose." (Beverley Nichols)