Social

This article is the third and last in the "Parenting School" series. The first two parts were published in the May and June 2020 issues of Semnele Timpului, the Romanian version of the ST Network.

When Reader's Digest asked readers to share a time when someone took care of one of their needs, the stories poured in, proving that our world is still full of ambassadors of generosity.

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

Money is essential in our Western world. It allows us to purchase the necessities of life—food and shelter, for instance. It pays the bills for heating and cooling. There may even be enough for some luxuries.

Social interactions and the tools that facilitate them are changing the world in ways that even now, after all this time, we cannot anticipate.

Almost half of Romanians are in debt, while 39% say that they don’t pay their debt on time, and 29% never create a budget. These figures, based on the most recent national studies, reflect Romanians’ values and financial literacy, but they can also represent the starting point of a conversation about "good debt" and "bad debt."

The book written by John Ortberg, All the Places to Go... How Will You Know? invites us to reflect on the discerning of God’s will for our lives.

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?

A cold flash, like the strange, icy feeling after a burn, runs through his body with every breath. He feels his heart racing. It feels like it is counting down to the moment when it will explode—or, mercifully, to the moment when he will turn his pillow to the cooler side, and finally fall asleep.

“To be fearless may be a gift. However, the most precious one is, probably, the courage resulting from developing the habit of not allowing fear to dictate your actions”, says the renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy activist in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, in her essay titled “Free from fear”.

Courage is a special virtue: unlike other virtues that can be formed and polished over time, courage only makes itself known spontaneously and fully in situations where one is required to act, proving its existence.

In a world of many predetermined things, friends are the family we choose for ourselves. Often, their presence is what keeps us going. In Vital Friends, Tom Rath says that many of those who end up on the streets, divorced, or addicted to overeating, struggle with inner demons precisely because they are alone. They feel excluded, abandoned, unloved.

Little over a decade ago, a highly acclaimed British documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux, stepped into the midst of 500 paedophiles admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Coalinga, California, trying to find out if the complex treatment the convicts had to go through was really working.

It is not we who educate our children, they educate themselves. Unique, complete, amazing. Every child and every childhood is a challenge to discover and respect their individuality. Let's enjoy the revelations they give us and grow ourselves by observing and facilitating their growth.

Although the concept of human dignity may appear relatively recent from a historical perspective, the notion of human worth has a long history, as evidenced by accounts in the Book of Genesis, Cicero, and Kant, among others.