When making friends is not easy | Friendship and shyness

Next to family and health, friends are among the top reasons that make us happy. But what if we are solitary, recluse or shy?

How to navigate through pain

Loss begets pain, but pain is not one-size-fits-all, so there are no recovery methods that work in all situations. We do have at hand, however, explanatory models of pain, studies that dismantle myths about grief and, above all, "a psychological immune system" that helps us recover from painful experiences.

What not to say to a person suffering from depression

Your friend, who is suffering from depression, needs you. What should you tell them in such moments, and what should you not? No matter how well-intended they are, your words can become emotional weapons, whether you like it or not.

Realistic expectations, the secret of lasting relationships

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.

Give a little, change a lot

Seeing a team care for remote villages in the Solomon Islands showed me how small donations can make a real big difference.

Life-giving depression

It’s an invisible force, lurking and weighing heavily within, gradually convincing you that life isn’t worth much, that it’s better to let go. From the depths of depression, the journey back is incredibly tough, but not impossible. Kevin Breel is one of those people who can attest to this.

COVID-19: Inequality and the pandemic

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

Too tired to love?

Too tired to even touch hands, my husband, Bernie, and I crawled into bed. It was the end of a day in which we’d hardly spoken to each other, except to ask where things were or say where we were going—or had been. Our house had been full of guests for several weeks. To make matters worse, we’d just moved in and there...

Choosing happy

Paul was imprisoned by the Roman Emperor. He was on Death Row. Every morning, when he opened his eyes, he didn’t know if this day would be his last, and whether he would be thrown to the lions or burned.

Freedoms on the verge of extinction

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." (Ayn Rand)

The bilingual child’s advantages

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.

Are Christians better equipped to make decisions?

"All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature" through the decisions you make, wrote CS Lewis. If the choices we make really have such an impact, how can Christians make sure they make the right decisions?

What is the value of patience in a world of passions?

Global warming, plastic pollution, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, extreme weather events, artificial intelligence, global resource depletion, social inequality, the proliferation of social media abuse and manipulation through fake news, the resurgence of political extremes with racist and nationalist overtones—these are some of the "signs of the times" that are analysed in the media as elements that could each cause radical changes in society. But why...

The relay of small acts of kindness

In chaos theory, there is something that scientists call the “butterfly effect”—a seemingly insignificant event triggers a series of other events that later acquire significant importance. The butterfly effect has been used outside the realm of science as a metaphor for small things that have a considerable impact. When it comes to kindness, few things could demonstrate the butterfly effect better than the...

Major religions and their perspectives on cremation

Cremation has been part of the death rituals of various cultures since prehistoric times, but with the advent and spread of Christianity, cremation began to be used less and less. Most Christian denominations see it as a taboo. Let's discover why.