Social

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?

For at least one party, sibling estrangement can be more painful than loss through death, writes Fern Schumer Chapman, who was excluded from her brother's life for four decades.

In some African communities, during the harsh dry season when food becomes scarce and mothers can no longer feed all their children, a tragic custom persists: some children are left in open-air enclosures to die of starvation.

We love stories, and Hollywood knows how to dramatise them. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Hollywood is first and foremost an industry driven by ratings and profits. Children are more vulnerable and more likely than adults to pick up identity models from the film world.

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.

Every generation of parents loves their children and searches for the best ways to support them and prepare them for a successful start in life. Modern parents, however, often take this effort to extremes, complicating their children’s lives (and their own, just as much) in an attempt to clear a perfectly smooth path for their still-uncertain steps.

When war steps out of the pages of history books and into the real world, it resonates with a harsh, cutting tone, becoming a seismic record of humanity’s darkest nightmares. The recurring faces of war’s hideous nature show that, no matter how advanced human civilization becomes, moral evil doesn’t disappear—it merely gets passed down from generation to generation, patiently waiting for the right...

We think we know what a good life is, but what is a "good death", if it exists? When incurable diseases ravage the body and death becomes an imminent reality, the question takes on painful outlines, especially in a society open to arranging the circumstances of death according to the will of its protagonist.

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.

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

Aside from fuelling jokes about how women impose unrealistic standards on men, or how men are just grown-up children who want their wives to be their mothers, the expectations couples place on their relationship define how they relate to each other, and influence marital satisfaction.

Self-sacrifice—the ability of some people to put the lives of others above their own—is not at all easy to understand.

Raising children with the ability to empathise is key in creating a kinder, more compassionate and loving world. 

The first time Judas's kiss was heard was in the Garden of Gethsemane. However, its echo is repeated whenever the trust of an unsuspecting soul is betrayed. Betrayal, especially when it wears the mask of faith, tears apart the moral fabric of those who are wounded by it.

“How can we rejoice if we’re at war?” This was one of the questions that arose in my mind after reading a book comprised of testimonies of people who experienced World War II as children. Decades after this nightmare, and stricken by a crisis that casts its shadow over people and nations everywhere, the question remains: can we still be happy in times...