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You wouldn’t think so, but whether or not children do chores is one predictor of their future happiness and success. 

He was only seven when the war started. He used to spend his time “running around and playing with my mates,” and then one day, the houses in his town started burning down and neighbours would go missing. His parents told him to stay indoors.

I am 33 years old, married and have a two-year-old daughter. It is great to be a mother and see how beautifully we were created. I was fascinated by pregnancy, I am still interested in the subject of natural births and I try to research as thoroughly as possible each stage we are going through.

"The Clifford Goldstein story" is addressed to those who, ever so often, feel the need to read something about experimentation, because it is not about theorising a rebellious young man's search for the path of life, but rather a true-life story.

Jesus’ woes are not uttered primarily in the face of sins such as theft, debauchery, or murder, about which we are so horrifed)—often hypocritically. His woes are directed precisely against hypocrisy[1], a form of soul pollution to which we often relate, unconsciously or not, laughing or smiling knowingly.

Most of us want to trust. We assume that others possess our own level of honesty and goodwill. Sadly, this is neither a sensible nor a safe attitude anymore.

In Mexico, diabetic retinopathy is a significant challenge. Professor Pedro Gomez is the director of the Ophthalmology Institute of the University Hospital of Montemorelos in Mexico, renowned for the highest number of eye surgeries in Latin America.

"If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them" (James 4:17).

A group of atheists in Sacramento, California, have prepared 55 billboards for the Christmas season, featuring images of local people and slogans such as "Good without God", "Doing good is my religion" or "Believe in yourself".

In a world of many predetermined things, friends are the family we choose for ourselves. Often, their presence is what keeps us going. In Vital Friends, Tom Rath says that many of those who end up on the streets, divorced, or addicted to overeating, struggle with inner demons precisely because they are alone. They feel excluded, abandoned, unloved.

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”.

To nothing else is the name of God so often linked in our human discourse as to suffering and deliverance. This locus is a huge and complicated intersection of our existence.

Sinking into darkness, after 14 years of enjoying all the spectacles of grace and beauty in which our world is enveloped, can be the beginning of tragedy. Or it can be the moment when you begin to discern, nuance by nuance, the splendour of a reality that healthy eyes so often miss.

I am not an expert on the phenomenon of death. But like all of us, I have to live in its shadow, and watch the restlessness and greed it causes. The same gloomy reports that circle the planet also reach me. I feel especially conscious of this as COVID-19 claims its first victims in my country.

Few things can pierce a parent’s heart as painfully as their children’s decision to walk away from God. Pain, guilt, shame and the feeling of failure are the crushing burdens which parents of prodigal sons carry, while still wavering between hope and discouragement.