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Growing up on the sunny east coast of Australia meant summers at the beach. I was no surfer dude but the crash of waves and unmistakable squeak of hot sand was often a soundtrack in my adolescence. It’s easy to romanticise the white sand beaches and crystal blue hues of Australia’s coastal waters but now, particularly as a parent, I am aware of the danger...

"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?

The miracle of modern technology today is idealised by almost everyone. The way in which technology has placed the world at our feet, ensuring that we are at the centre of the universe even while lying on our couches, and that we find solutions simply by swiping our finger along a screen, has irredeemably conquered us.

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. 

The impulse to help is a hallmark of humanity—both evolutionists and creationists agree that a selfless act is something that makes us uniquely human. Even more so, as a community of faith, it’s exciting to realise that within every compassionate action exists an insight into the loving character of our Creator God.

Meetings with people and books have shaped the space for a sometimes unequal, sometimes unsatisfactory growth between the human I am and the one I would like to be.

If we were to liken life to the Olympics, then we would easily understand two fundamental things: you can’t score first in all the tests and, even in the areas where you are very capable, you can win by doing less than your best if those you compete against are not much of a challenge.

Although the "Climate Emergency Declaration" was adopted by the European Parliament as a symbolic act, more and more countries, and even cities, began to take the issue seriously. On December 18th 2019, the Munich city council declared a climate emergency, and the municipality said it intended to reach climate neutrality by 2035.

For Carl Sagan, renowned astronomer and militant atheist, God's place in the universe was certain: "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." For Richard Dawkins, exponent of the "new wave" of atheism, true science is necessarily atheistic and materialistic. This paradigm dominates the scientific world today.

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

I was a pagan as a child. Not by choice, but as a consequence of lacking any access to the Word of God. In the 1980s Romania, catechizing an Orthodox child (whose parents were members of the Communist Party) was a highly unlikely event Pavlik Morozov’s myth, the hero-child that denounced his own father, generated caution.

Courage is not the opposite of fear, nor of caution. True courage is what you do right in the midst of fear.

I never cease to marvel at those who help, in an organized manner, troubled children, abandoned elderly or victims of violence. However, the general need for such heroic saviours reveals the failure of the social group that is apt to address these situations: the family.

"This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger" (Luke 2:12).

If shame were personified, its main characteristic would be its ability to creep into the darkest depths, avoiding any trace of light and any discussion of itself.