Latest Posts
What a Woman Does in the Home
I have written on this before, and I plan to write on it again. I know I will never sufficiently understand it in this life, but I will keep trying. I’m talking about what a woman does in a home. Herein is a primordial revelation about how God loves us, and…
Front Porch Time: An American Tradition*
In The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place, Michael Dolan shares that in researching his book he discovered that what he thought was as American as “a greenback dollar” turned out to be instantiated across epochs and cultures. What Dolan learned…
Speaking as Though I Received What I Say
There are a number of lines that I repeat often to my students as capturing root truths. One of them is this: always be attentive to what you can call ‘mine,’ or not. At the heart of reality is the truth that much can become ‘mine’ that was not originally mine. This…
Fathers at Home: A Better View of Gender Roles in the Family
This was published yesterday in The Institute of Family Studies Blog, part of their Father’s Day series: In reflecting on Father’s Day this year, I want to address the issue of a father’s role in the home. This issue is particularly difficult to discuss today,…
Coping with Busyness: Leisure
In Aristotle and Aquinas’s mind everything comes down to leisure—that is, if we understand the term as they do. So I never tire of trying to understand it, and of revisiting key statements about it. One of my favorite lines gives a great angle into one of the foremost…
Joy Comes with Morning
There is something about morning. I was struck that in Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the gospel he associates morning with “the glory of the resurrection” and quotes Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Yet I ask myself: does…
Household and Beyond: the Common Good
There are so many centrifugal forces today that pull us away from what should be the center in daily life. I often dwell on the need to be intentional and re-focus on what we do inside the home. Yet this focus is not only compatible with but demands an appropriate…
Free of Passion, Full of Love?
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is rightly well known for its remarkable insights. I am often inspired by its maxims, such as “to be free of passion but yet full of love,” even while I think this and other maxims miss a key truth. Painting with a broad stroke about…
The Gift of Good Goodbyes
May is graduation time. So for many of us, it is a time for goodbyes. It is also a good time to reflect on the importance and even the gift of goodbyes, for all of us. We understandably dread goodbyes, especially with those we love most. Moments of parting can be…
Walking Together in Solitude
In Reclaiming Conversation Sherry Turkle offers a remarkably important and practical insight: we need to cultivate a “capacity for solitude.” Its profound significance is apparent in a simple assertion that says much about all of us, not just young people: “If we are…
3 Reasons to Seek Self-Knowledge
Though self-knowledge has been praised by great thinkers from ancient times to the present, we don’t give this all-too-rare quality the attention it demands. The importance of self-knowledge is probably most noticeable precisely when it is absent. And alas, often we…
Eager (Not Too Eager) for Friendship
It is a hard reality that in the very things most important to us we make missteps, sometimes precisely because they are so important to us. Friendship is a standout example. An insight from a master of friendship can help us make our eagerness for friendship an asset…