The competition is no longer about who provides the best information, but about who can hold our attention the longest. In a time when all screens are shouting, it is not necessarily those who shout the loudest people need—but those who speak in a quieter voice.

Perhaps as we face yet another new year of war, polarisation and distrust, we need reflection which goes beyond personal self-improvement. Perhaps we should ask the question Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky put to his fellow Ukrainians: How can we put our house in order?

In a time when technology is developing faster than our imagination, we are losing what the philosopher Ernst Bloch called the power of hope – the ability to create because something is missing.

Without justice’, wrote Augustine in City of God, ‘what are kingdoms but great bands of criminals?

Influencers who promise financial freedom are shaping a new culture of risk among young people. Behind the images of luxury, European investigations reveal an economy that is not understood but imitated, and a generation taking risks without the tools needed to navigate them.

While Russia presses Ukraine to surrender land, European politicians meet for prayer in Brussels—much like Schuman, Adenauer and de Gasperi once did when they sought God’s wisdom to rebuild a continent shattered by war.

To claim that we live in an increasingly digital age is rather uncontroversial. Areas that until recently were considered hallmarks of the physical and analogue—such as various aspects of human emotions and social behaviour[AU1] —are rapidly becoming ‘datafied’ and brought into the digital realm.

On Sunday, September 21, nearly 100,000 people attended a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, a right-wing Christian political activist who was shot and killed at a Utah university 11 days earlier.

The spirit of sauna diplomacy lives on at the golf course. Stubb has simply traded the sauna ladle for a golf club.

- There is a feeling of us and them, and of detachment. This is serious. We need to reconstruct a system where the parties are connected to people again, where there is interaction with associations and organizations, trade unions, startups and religious communities. How to do this?

In a rapidly changing world, Europe now assumes a role it has not played since the colonial days.  This time around, the mission focuses on peace and stability, not exploitation and self-enrichment.

The desire among many for a society less influenced by “woke” culture may, perhaps, trump long-term thinking about what truly grants us freedom and the opportunity to live good lives. We need to rediscover-and also renew-the system of governance that the Haugeans played such a vital role in building.