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There is no time like the end of the year that stirs our interest in self-improvement. Many of us are thinking of the new beginnings, lofty goals and big dreams we want to chase after, optimistic that the next year will be different to the last. Yet there is one thing we would do well to take in our stride before we enter...

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.

I never cease to marvel at those who help, in an organized manner, troubled children, abandoned elderly or victims of violence. However, the general need for such heroic saviours reveals the failure of the social group that is apt to address these situations: the family.

Can you be happily married to anyone? The idea of ​​happiness as a thing of one's own creation persists in our times, although its cultural sedimentation belongs to the modern age.

Talking to your children about death can be an act of love. You can't take away their pain with a simple conversation, but you can give them something just as important: truth wrapped in gentleness, the reassurance and relief that they are not alone in their grief, and even the hope that sees beyond the loss.

“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

“Everything is finite—except pain.” (Mihai Eminescu, Reflections)

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

The wind is blowing and it is snowing at the Siret Customs Point. Refugee groups stream by, women with children clinging to them, and the words of a little girl from another war, concluded almost eight decades ago, keep running through my mind: “And this was imprinted in my mind, that when my father is not home, it is war.”

Before the age of two, most children think the world revolves around them. From their point of view, what they think and how they feel must be what others think and feel, too. They don’t have the concept that other people have different needs and perspectives. It’s why if they can’t see you when they’re playing hide-and-seek, they believe you surely can’t see...

Walking with a friend in darkness is better than walking alone in the light, writes Hellen Keller. But what if darkness permeates the entire relationship?

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

Mainstream culture has tried to airbrush guilt out of everyday life. It’s the ultimate social faux pas, it seems, to make someone feel guilty—How dare you judge me! Or maybe it’s the penultimate faux pas, because what’s even worse than making someone feel guilty inside is to shame them in front of others.

Children have big feelings. Even worse, children have big feelings over what seem to be rather inconsequential things.

The perspectives we acquire as children about ourselves as individuals, about the world, and even about God, become beliefs that filter and guide the choices we make as adults. Some of these beliefs are helpful. Others are not. In fact, many of the obstacles we encounter in adult life are caused by these filters.