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In this heartfelt collection of interviews, six women from diverse backgrounds reflect on the joys, challenges, and lessons of motherhood and grandparenting. From raising children during communism in Romania to navigating single parenthood, depression, and cultural transitions, their stories offer wisdom, resilience, and deep love across generations. A moving portrait of motherhood’s enduring strength.

Sexual extortion or “sextortion” is a form of blackmail where someone threatens to share an intimate image or video of you unless you meet their demands. Often, they’ll intimidate you by threatening to send the compromising content to everybody on your contact list unless you send money or more explicit images or videos of yourself.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross” (Heb. 12: 2 NIV).

I’ll never be able to separate the memories of childhood from that of books. They intertwine like colours in fabrics, in a jumble of real and fantastical, bitter and sweet, joy and guilt.

“…the world was not worthy of them…” (Hebrews 11:38)

When confronted with the pandemic, we are anything but equals.

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."

After the authorities in different countries announced a relaxation of the restrictions, people started to impatiently waiting for that, maybe even with plans to recover last bits of a confiscated spring.

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (…) I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:8, 13).

The Japanese Okinawans have a peculiar way of eating that supposedly extends their lifespan. What can we learn from them?

From a distance, it looked like a simple picture of a tree: nothing very artistic—more of a sketch in subtle shades of brown and green. But as I looked closer I noticed something unusual. The tree had been constructed out of words and phrases. Someone had collected snippets of information about their family and their ancestors, and written it down to form the...

The readers who immerse themselves in the maze of paper and ink, savouring every word, seem to be on the verge of extinction.

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.”

Holiday greetings are a nice custom, but they are also an opportunity to assess how much we care about each other, how much we have grown closer or, on the contrary, how much we have grown apart over the past year.

Let’s begin by extrapolating Paul’s assertion: “...but test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).