Social

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

The faith of Generation Z is a recent phenomenon. In the United States, at least, young people attend church more frequently than older generations. This change signals huge opportunities for the Church. However, the picture is far from complete. 

A common source of jokes and stories with subtext, the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law appears to be characterised by particular sensitivities.

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

Because life in developed societies follows a more or less regular pattern, sociologists have managed to identify the age at which conditions are most conducive to forming a friendship. It's not that people who are not of this age are unable to form meaningful connections with other people, but at other ages, life takes us on different paths, without asking for our permission.

A friend carries within him our identity’s safe box.

“We all feel stronger if we are part of a tapestry. One thread alone is weak, but, woven into something larger, surrounded by other threads, it is more difficult to unravel,” says family therapist Stefan Walters, summarising the benefits of understanding the history of the family we come from.

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.

The mental load is a concept that has gained attention in the last little while. What if mental load had a baby?

Urban alienation is one of the great themes approached critically by many artists.

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.

How can we protect ourselves against expecting too much of our friendships? Can we do something to prepare for the disappointment? And what does one do to deal with it?

In the age of the internet and the “global village,” an irrational fear taking hold in a small American town can easily go viral, reaching and affecting us all. Once online, news—whether true or false—can have a corrosive effect, leading us to feel cynical about the future and to hold low expectations for our leaders.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Henri Nouwen once wrote about some trapeze artists who became his friends, emphasising the perfect synchronicity between them and the total trust that the one who jumps has when he lets go of the trapeze and remains in the air for a second, waiting to be caught by his teammate. But what if, at the last moment, when it is too late to...