Latest Posts
Stewardship: A Way of Life
“To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve.” Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance In this post I want briefly to examine the meaning of stewardship. In two following posts I will examine more specifically how stewardship pertains to...
LifeCraft: The New Bacon from Acorns
“How one should order one's own affairs is not clear and needs inquiry.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I am happy to announce today significant new offerings at this website. Bacon from Acorns has been my effort to share what I am blessed to call my...
The Beauty of a Wedding Anniversary
“My soul takes pleasure in three things, and they are beautiful in the sight of the Lord and of men; agreement between brothers, friendship between neighbors, and a wife and a husband who live in harmony.” Sirach Among these three beautiful things, the third perhaps...
Christmas: The End of the Power of Wickedness
…He makes His passage into mortal life at a time in which the darkness was beginning to fail, and the vast expanse of night to fade away before the exceeding brightness of the light. For the death of sin had brought an end of wickedness which from henceforth tends to...
Belloc on Observing Christmas
Christmas is not the birth of Christ; what the birth of Christ was, and is, will never change. Christmas is a celebration, a remembrance and marking of the birth of Christ – and it has changed, and is still changing. “People ask themselves how much remains of this...
Teaching Beauty
“We must teach beauty not from horror of ugliness but rather by attraction to beauty.” Charles Peguy, ‘The School Teachers’ in Basic Verities Beauty is not the private reserve of the aesthete, nor the artist or the highly cultured. It is the inheritance of all. It is...
A New Attitude toward Tradition
‘To participate in a tradition,’ ‘to be in a tradition’ means: to accept something handed down as a thing handed down. …anyone who carelessly rejects the external traditions or treats them with irony is doing something dangerous.” Josef Pieper, The Concept of...
Thankful for When Children Were Young
“..and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day.” Virgil, The Aeneid I have to admit it: it's been hard for me recently as I think back on when my children were younger. A few days ago my wife and I, and our eight year old son—who is seven...
The Longing for Things Higher
“After the sufferings of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”...
Defending Your Right Not to Know
“…or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything.’ But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable...
Mulch: Using Nature’s Plan for Life
“Art imitates nature.” Aristotle VIDEO FOLLOWED BY DISTINCT WRITTEN REFLECTION This growing season was dry. A number of trees, not to mention my garden, suffered. Upon seeing them losing leaves in early September, I asked my local state forester to look at my trees,...
Two Reasons to Take Cool Showers
“All these things are interconnected.” Xenophon, The Estate Manager This is one of my all-time favorite quotations. It speaks to so many things. The original context in Xenophon is Ischomachus reporting how he would put his horse through its paces while riding over...