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One Life Lesson from the Magi
Well into January Christians have always focused on one of the strangest stories in the New Testament: the mysterious men from the East. Somehow this story brings Christmas to our daily life. Fathers of the Church found many lessons in the pilgrimage of the Magi,...
Longing for Home at Christmastime
Home is like heaven. What more is there to say? Dickens’s immortal short story of Christmas goes to the deepest longings of the human heart. This stands to reason, as the great drama of human life is always a drama of home, and home-coming. And this tends to come to...
The Gift God Offers at Christmastime
We are rightly reminded at Christmas to keep in mind the reason for the season, or the reality that we are celebrating. A less-considered but related angle is that our very celebrating can and should change us. Or in any case it can dispose us for what often escapes...
Carrying the Dead with Us at Christmas
It is not an accident that Christmas makes us think of times gone by, and especially of people gone by. Perhaps we experience this as a sort of cruel twist as we get older. We might wonder why it can’t be like it was before, when ‘everyone’ was there. There is much...
Christmas Calls for Tradition and Creativity
The story is told of the family that year after year, regardless of the neighbors raising questions, was true to their tradition of cutting the leg of a pig a little shorter than normal butchering practice. Eventually it came to light that their particular practice...
Singing in the Home: Is It Essential?
“Only the lover sings.” Though St. Augustine’s rightly famous words strike us as true, we perhaps do not immediately grasp a corollary: love calls for and even demands singing. To sing—at least in a certain way—both expresses and cultivates the very love from which it...
Recovering Leisure at Thanksgiving: Planning Spontaneity
It is one of the great crises of our day, the more serious for its being largely unnoticed. The lack of truly ‘free time’ in our life is masked by our referring to chunks of our time as ‘free.’ But for several generations, wise observers have pointed to a radical new...
Choosing Joy and the Glass Half Full
Joy might seem an arbitrary thing in its coming and going. That joy is hard to figure out—both what it is and where it comes from—is no surprise, given the depths of the human heart. A question that often roils in my mind is whether I can simply choose to be joyful. I...
Interior Design: Crafting the Homelife We Want
A home is not only where the next generation is initiated into human life. It is also where each of us must find a space conducive to every-day living. And as Wendell Berry insists, all living things need a congenial context in order to thrive. This starts in our...
3 Ways to Rediscover a Father
Much of what we need in life we must ask for. As this is simply a given, it points to the importance of learning how, what, and whom to ask. Thomas Aquinas holds that we can naturally know that there is a God who can help us, and who is worthy of honor and worship....
To Eat Well: 2 Arts and 2 Virtues
So much of what it is to be human is at stake in how we eat. No wonder we need several arts and virtues really to do it well. Thomas Aquinas has much to say about eating. A starting point is how the art of medicine, rightly understood and practiced, should have a key...
What is Glory, and Why It Matters
It is remarkable how many words we use—often even important ones—without a clear notion of what they mean. Glory has been one of those words for me. Then one day I read a definition in Thomas Aquinas that fairly stopped me in my tracks. “The word glory properly...
