Social

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

When strangers give you a helping hand after your friends have forgotten about you, the world suddenly seems a little more beautiful. This was the experience of PJ Robins when a crowd of strangers suddenly arrived at the party for his autistic little girl, which no one else had wanted to attend.

Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.

If shame were personified, its main characteristic would be its ability to creep into the darkest depths, avoiding any trace of light and any discussion of itself.

I once invited the cashier at my local 7-Eleven petrol station to join me and my friends on a beach couch made of sand to eat hotdogs after his shift. To our surprise, he not only came but continued to join us for months after.

From a certain point of view, our life can be divided into moments when we have let circumstances determine our future, and moments when we have gone where we wanted to go, despite the circumstances.

"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?

Over the last few decades, the picture of family life has undergone dramatic changes. The pervasiveness and normalization of divorce are just two of these changes.

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

You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).

“In the works of Comenius one feels that a prophet is speaking; he was indeed a colossal figure, but only in recent years have his ideas received the respect they merit”.

There are many moments when, in situations that seem to have no solution and everyone has given up believing, especially the one who needs the solution, help comes in a completely unexpected way. For James Bowen, his rescue came in the form of an injured ginger cat.

Eye-catching banners on high-traffic websites, marketing campaigns, genuine or illusory discounts, deals that vanish in seconds. Shopping lists, fierce price hunts, early morning alarms. Jumping the gun, millions in sales, ecstatic or dissatisfied customers, delayed deliveries, and blown budgets. In a word: Black Friday.

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Love is the most beautiful and perhaps the most incomprehensible thing in the world. We find it in movies, in books, in the strength of a "yes" declared before the civil authorities, and in the embrace that binds spouses at the end of a hard day's work.