Social

Introverts are said to be shy, quiet, withdrawn people who like to spend time alone, or who don't like people. Most of this information is incorrect.

Grandparents who play an active role in the lives of their grandchildren enjoy a range of health and well-being benefits—including, according to research, a longer and happier life.

Lucy is an 8-year-old girl who has a range of interests broader than that of an ordinary adult. She is enrolled in an international school, where classes are taught in French by native speakers. Her classmates are children of expats from different cultures, which amuses her nanny, who, when picking her up from school, says that she "took her from the children's UN."

Although we may not like everyone, we want everyone to like and accept us. We raise our eyebrows suspiciously if someone treats us with indifference or, worse, with hostility. We feel misunderstood and rejected. And the feeling of rejection is as intense as physical pain.

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. 

Humans have been telling stories ever since the dawn of civilisation. What stories do we tell about ourselves and how do they affect our identity?

Bruce Reichenbach's book, Divine Providence: God’s Love and Human Freedom is impressive first of all due to the author’s total disinterest in impressing his readers. Instead, he has a legacy to pass on.

I clearly remember the days following the Revolution of 1989 in Romania. Whoever you met would speak about freedom: “Now we can say what we think out loud. We no longer have to whisper. We are free!”

In A History of Young People in the West, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt posit that, in the West, adolescence is first and foremost a social-cultural construction, and therefore a cultural product. They considered it at most subsidiarily as a stage in the physiological process of growing up.

Footballers are often in the headlines for their off-field antics more than their on-field achievements. So, it is no real surprise that the greatest story to come out of the AFL is not about a nail-biting final or freakishly skilled player.

When a closed window shade becomes an SOS sent by those used to living on their own but afraid of dying alone, something has fundamentally changed in a society that not long ago valued human relationships.

Sometimes, parents end up not having any free time during the day. Why is relaxation not easy for parents?

For many people, the New Year is the catalyst for making changes they didn't have time or energy for in the previous year. On 1 January, the list of resolutions grows promisingly long, but keeping them can become a real ordeal in the tangle of daily problems and deadlines. Statistics show that even before the month of snowdrops, many of the commitments made...

The Oxford Online Dictionary describes theology as “the study of the nature of God and religious belief”. That’s a helpful understanding, but let’s begin with some seriously bad theology as practised by the Russian mystic and faith healer Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. 

"If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light." (Victor Hugo)