Education

In 2016, I noticed advertising for a new quiz show called Hard Quiz coming to ABC TV in Australia.

For some people, suffering is temporary. For others, life itself can be a long series of painful blows. However, experience shows that recovery is possible even when people seem to be at the end of their tether.

At the age of nine, the young Dante Alighieri fell hopelessly in love with Beatrice Portinari, a young woman of about the same age, whose image would haunt him for the rest of his life and inspire one of the most famous female characters in universal literature.

On 29 May 2023, photographer Oleksandr Kuchynskyi filmed a group of children in Kiev fleeing to a shelter during an air raid.

Every loving parent wants their child to become sharper, more intelligent, and to develop the essential skills needed to succeed in life. Science offers several key “tools” parents can use to help their child boost IQ and unlock potential, making them powerful advocates for their child’s future success.

The book written by John Ortberg, All the Places to Go... How Will You Know? invites us to reflect on the discerning of God’s will for our lives.

Fundamentalist movements, extremist and sectarian religious beliefs, manipulations of the mass of believers, conspiracy theories within religious sects, and other such threats, emphasise the need for critical thinking.

Roberto Badenas is a Seventh-day Adventist who specialises in Bible studies and is a New Testament teacher, with a theological leadership career that reflects his concern for people.

Anyone who thinks they know exactly how to raise a child will usually change their perspective after becoming a parent. Beyond the joy of welcoming a new family member, they are confronted with the "despair and helplessness" of navigating the complex and unfamiliar world in which they now find themselves, writes psychotherapist Isabelle Filliozat.

In 1867, when Edson White was 18 years old and working at the Adventist type-room in Battle Creek, Michigan, he had a transformative conversation with Mr Bell.

Money is essential in our Western world. It allows us to purchase the necessities of life—food and shelter, for instance. It pays the bills for heating and cooling. There may even be enough for some luxuries.

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books." (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British poet)

The young generations of women raised with the ideal of the family in which the man and the woman are team partners, equal both at home and outside it, discover that their expectations have taken precedence over the real course of society. The most surprised are, unpredictably, women who are highly educated.

It is said that the intelligent and cynical Talleyrand, a French diplomat and Catholic priest who was later secularised, said to Napoleon when asked to devise a political message: "Sir, give me the idea and I'll find the arguments myself..." If such an intellectual attitude is cynical and unscrupulous in politics, let's imagine the consequences in the religious sphere.

"One Thousand Gifts" describes the beautiful revolt of a soul that does not want to be crippled by what it has lost, but to pierce its own suffering like an arrow springing from the bow of grace, a leitmotif of the whole book.