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Love stories have a way of creeping into the foreground and convincing us that their effervescent debut is just the overture to a marriage that will always rekindle, in a different intensity, the same fireworks of beginnings.

Sometimes I think I was born with a magnifying glass in my hand, one through which I critically scrutinize everything I do and say and which relentlessly magnifies every imperfection.

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

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.

Adults who choose not to have children are often portrayed as selfish people, so preoccupied with their own lives that the prospect of the sacrifices that raising a child would entail seems repulsive to them. Is this view fair or is it just an unfair judgement?

How can we protect ourselves against expecting too much of our friendships? Can we do something to prepare for the disappointment? And what does one do to deal with it?

Pastor and author Ed Gungor reckons he’s learned a lot about life from Frank, his small white-haired terrier. So much so that he has entitled his book One Small Barking Dog: How to Live a Life That’s Hard to Ignore. 

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.

Poverty and laughter don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. People who are worried about where their next meal will come from or where their children will sleep that night find it hard to wear smiles.

While the debate over the “ideal age” for fatherhood may go on endlessly, one fact is clear: the average age at which men in modern society become fathers has steadily increased in recent decades. Behind the polished statistics lie moving personal stories about what it means to embrace fatherhood at an age when youth is little more than a distant memory.

In the age of the internet and the “global village,” an irrational fear taking hold in a small American town can easily go viral, reaching and affecting us all. Once online, news—whether true or false—can have a corrosive effect, leading us to feel cynical about the future and to hold low expectations for our leaders.

One of the best-known stories told by ambitious entrepreneurs today is that if you work hard, you will have a lot.

I request from my colleagues at the ST.N editorial office at least three sources for news and at least two books for the analysis topics: one for and one against. Ideally, the reading of the first two books will give rise to the desire to look for at least two more, so that the differences are clearer. After that, there will be a...

"When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself" (Milan Kundera).

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.