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These days we all need to hear good news—that life will soon return to normal and that we will be able to return to the troubles of yesterday, which now seem small to us. In the meantime, our lifestyle has seen changes that we could not have imagined just a few weeks ago.

The stakes are high when it comes to identifying the one to whom we should pray, and we can discover who by answering an apparently simple question: Can we expect prayers to be heard no matter who we address them to?

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

Raising a child is not easy at all. Raising someone else’s child is even harder. But raising six children who are not your own, giving up your life, sounds crazy to most of us.

Romantic love is easily hurt and somewhat pretentious, especially when faced with direct honesty. Friendship is more solid.

This article is the third and last in the "Parenting School" series. The first two parts were published in the May and June 2020 issues of Semnele Timpului, the Romanian version of the ST Network.

"Loneliness irritates me like a broken nail," says a line in a Romanian poem. The truth is, loneliness stings, pulls apart, and resembles the coffee dregs left at the bottom of the pot in which joy and love once brewed. Although the fear of loneliness is natural, we can choose to see solitude as something more than a "flowering wilderness" and embrace it...

Eskimos don't have the word "quarrel" in their vocabulary. They live in a particularly harsh climate, so no one wants to risk getting pneumonia (or dying) just to prove that they are right.

We often do it without even thinking. Labelling our children as shy, cheeky, fussy or even smart. In the right context, calling our children these things is innocent enough. It even helps explain certain types of behaviour. 

The child’s linguistic appetite must be stimulated from an early age, experts say, highlighting that the benefits the bilingual child reaps extend beyond the linguistic sphere.

Couples do not break up because they fight, but because they do not know how to argue, relationship therapists say, underlining the functional components of the differences between partners.

"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.

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones, says a well-known biblical proverb. We don't have to be practicing Christians to recognise its truth.

Elspeth Muir’s brother, Alexander, died from drowning. It was 2009, and he had just turned 21. He died from drowning, but his death “was not foreshadowed by his love of water except that it explains why he was near a river, alone, with a blood-alcohol content of almost 0.25. My brother died because he was drunk, and because the drink made him stupid.”

Amy Ainsworth is the mother of 5-year-old twin girls, whose appearance is both surprising and fascinating – how could it be any other way when you see a pair of big green eyes showing off from behind the brown curls of one of the girls, contrasting strikingly with the coffee-coloured eyes and black, straight hair of her twin sister?