Latest Posts
Aquinas on Going Up for the Feast
Certain special days are more at the center of life. Some are particular to the person (e.g., wedding, death of parent, graduation); others have universal significance. For Christians, the Paschal days are most special; they are simply the center. How we live them is...
3 Ways Children Can Grow Our Friendship
It is proverbial that children are a unique bond between spouses. More than just a psychological bond, raising children (in the broad and rich sense, which takes a lifetime) is the single greatest natural catalyst, context, and cause of growing marital friendship. A...
New Eyes in Spring
A man yelled in the middle of my public lecture, “I see your point!” I was a bit flustered. Then I noticed the man was blind. His outburst highlights a paradox at the center of human life: there is seeing, and there is seeing. What does it take to see in the sense...
Spring: Make Life Seasonal Again
Spring is calling. And we can answer, before it’s too late. Nature—and I mean the wonderful world bursting into bloom and the human nature throbbing within us—is always on our side. It never stops calling us to richer, fuller life. We can listen to our flesh. It has...
Sent to be a Father
If we but had a fuller sense of what it is to be a man or a woman, we would find greater joy in it. If only we knew the gift of God, then, perhaps, we would respond in hope and joy. Men, for instance, would thrill to the drama already implied in the fact of their...
Lent is For Learning to Taste Things
It might seem we cannot change how things taste to us. But our wants—which determine our pleasures and pains—come under our control. It is our challenge and our glory to strive to bring our wants and tastes into conformity with the truth. Such is the ultimate...
Lent Begins with My Spouse
This title can sound like a joke on my wife. It is not. (More truly it could be a joke on me.) Marriage is at the center of the life-drama of anyone who is married. It is always a fitting place to begin again, to start afresh. Especially in Lent. A classic principle...
3 Keys to Having Good Fun
Having truly good fun is a virtue. This might seem to undermine the very notion of fun by making it a serious matter. Yet here we can discover once again that right-thinking always brings out the true richness of human life. Thomas Aquinas has a subtle and beautiful...
Where Do You Graze Your Flock?
It is perhaps the most important thing I ask someone I love. In a sense, nothing else matters. “Show me, you whom my soul loves, where you graze your flock, where you rest at midday.” (Song of Songs 1:7) Wherever that is, so there will I live. With you. This brings to...
The Antidote to News: Real Life Here and Now
Wise men and the purveyors of contemporary culture recognize the same dramatic truth. We are addicted to news. Probably unlike the purveyors, the wise perceive the root of the addiction and so can offer something the purveyors don’t want—a path to freedom. Over...
The Best Reason to Read Aloud Together
There is nothing quite like the silence that comes over the room at the close of the final sentence. For a brief yet timeless stretch we are all there together, highly aware of one another but in wonderful solitude. Then, the conversation begins. The power of reading...
That I Might Be Seen
The hard conversation with a loved one comes to an impasse. A welter of feelings resolves into one overriding pain: I don’t feel seen. In the end the greatest suffering is to be, or feel, alone. And to feel unseen is the very heart of loneliness. Josef Pieper...