Latest Posts
Made for Contemplation: 3 Practical Applications for Everyday
Perhaps the most overlooked truth about human life is that we are made for contemplation. All of us. It’s not that our activist and practical age directly rejects this. Almost worse, our customs, practices and expectations take for granted that anything called...
Husbands and Wives Need Husbandry and Housewifery
“This destroyed household that now stands between the sexes is a wound that is suffered inescapably by both men and women.” My eyes were opened when I read these words of Wendell Berry. My wife’s suffering in a home arrangement that has shown itself more and more to...
Reconsider Your Lawn Today
I was shocked to learn that my cousins in a suburban community were fined by their homeowners association (HOA) for having clover in their lawn. Doing a little research I discovered this is not unusual; in fact many HOA’s have rules that forbid a wide array of...
Making Easter the Cornerstone of Our Year
It is near impossible to overstate the significance of Easter. It stands out as primary and unique for at least three reasons. 1. While the focused celebration of Easter is for a set time—first an intense week (eastern Christianity has the lovely name of ‘Bright...
Holy Week Doesn’t Just Change Life; It is Life
Holy Week and Easter can be a bit overwhelming. We sense this is an opportunity we should not miss, but just what to do can be elusive. An insight into human nature from Plato and Aristotle can encourage and give us practical direction. Plato once asked, “Do you think...
Why We Need a New Kind of Homesteading
‘Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one...
Rediscover the Ordinary This Spring
I am convinced that our most significant response to the challenges of our age will be in the most ordinary practices. I do not say the obvious but the ordinary. Ordinary is a great word; it means what pertains to the regular order. We live in a time when what used to...
Addressing Disembodiment in our Relationships
We are consistently told that bodily presence is optional and expendable. This message is reinforced by technologies that make being ‘remote’ easy and attractive. And the fact is we have changed our lives accordingly—to the detriment, especially, of the relationships...
When Life Is Even Better Than Gardening
I have discovered an arresting reference to how the drama of the soul is even better than the drama of the soil. Usually, we see how life is like cultivating the earth. Here, we have the joy of seeing how in a pivotal way it is significantly better. In examining the...
Ten Words to Transform Our Home Life
This is perhaps at once the most terrifying and practical of all the principles I have found in Thomas Aquinas. It explains so much of human unhappiness—especially today—while also pointing to a remedy, starting right in our homes. The principle is ten words, plus a...
Lenten Resolutions: Sowing Good Seed
The life-lessons from sowing seed are endless. Not every seed we plant will grow; but nothing can grow except from seed. We should always begin then by planting what we want to grow, even if it might not come to full fruition. “Man casts seed to the ground, when he...
2 Steps to Discovering Our Contemplative Identity
Perhaps the most dramatic assertion about human nature, in part because of the difficulty in comprehending it and its implications, is that man is at root a contemplative being. The great Josef Pieper famously asserts this point with unapologetic force: “Man,...
