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Featured Articles
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The Undoing of Uniting for Ukraine
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”~from “The New Colosssus” by Emma Lazarus
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Negative New Year's Resolutions
It’s New Year's Eve, and the countdown’s on. Finally, the clock strikes twelve, and the confetti and streamers fly. The champagne flows freely as people sing, cheer, and kiss as they welcome in the new year.
And then, January 1st unfurls itself like a flag, presenting its colors to the world, a boundless number of opportunities in its wake. And with all its pageantry and promise comes an innate, deep-seated desire to make promises and pledges to better ourselves. New year -- new us.
Ah, the New Year’s resolutions --the commitments we make to self-improvement, the unattainable bars we set so high for ourselves that we can never in a million new years live up to.
Well-intentioned proclamations cascade from our mouths like water racing down a mountain: “I’m going to go to the gym four times a week!” “I’m going to lose those final stubborn 15 pounds!” “I’m going to eat better!” “I’m going to cut out alcohol!”
It turns out that we are not alone in our desires. A study from Forbes Health/One Poll showed that for 2024 among people who set New Year’s resolutions, 48% expressed a desire for improved fitness. Following closely behind were folks who resolved to have better finances, enhanced mental health, dropped pounds, and healthier diets.
The Latest from Ukraine
Stephanie Trumble
Stephanie Trumble is an independent school teacher, a Ukrainian rights activist, a novelist, and a devotional writer.
When she’s not obsessing about her current book-in-progress, you can find her hanging out with her favorite dogs and humans in West Georgia.
Two days after Christmas, 59 year-old Natalie Kaschenko went to Kyiv to take care of some financial transactions. As she drove in, she saw buses heading toward her, leaving the city. But these were not the usual municipal buses on their normal routes; these buses were carrying the dead -- Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who had been killed in battle on the frontlines of the war with Russia.
Overcome with grief, Natalie had to pull over and get herself together before she went on into the city. And she still hasn’t been able to bring herself to tell her son, Oleg, about what she had seen because she found out shortly afterwards that one of the dead was a soldier in her son’s volunteer Territorial Guard group.