Latest Posts
What Keeps a Father Up at Night
Sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture, with good reason. Being kept up at night or inability to sleep is often a serious suffering. Yet being kept up, sometimes in the form of choosing to stay up, is a part of parenting. The arrival of a newborn in a...
Aquinas on What To Do With Fear
We know that each kind of passion has an important place in human life. Contrary to the ‘Stoic’ position, passions are not simply to be squashed or set aside. But discovering and enacting the proper place of passions is anything but straightforward. Thomas Aquinas...
Never Call Your Wife By Name Alone
One of the great Fathers of Christianity exhorts husbands in a most touching way. Indeed, it is so touching we must be careful not to miss the deeper point—that husbands have a unique obligation always to be tender in addressing their wife. St. John Chrysostom...
The Home of Responsibility
The crisis of responsibility, which is obvious to anyone today, first took root in our homes. We should then address it in our home life. For, of course, home is the ‘home’ of responsibility. There is no context that so clearly demands taking responsibility for others...
Suffering in Heaven
With classic insight into what it is to be human, St. Thomas Aquinas notes that in a sense there will be anguish in heaven. It is there as something remembered. “The saints in glory will remember the afflictions they endured,” yet “they will not experience them with...
Is My Body Mine?
“My body is not my own, but my wife’s.” So John Chrysostom admonishes a husband to tell any woman who would try to seduce him. In an age when many, surely including us, are tempted to see our body as ‘our own,’ this raises an issue of the first importance: what really...
To Find Wisdom at My Gate
I teach philosophy, and it’s not easy--especially for the students. This is no surprise given our lofty goal to make some progress toward wisdom. Often students can have a sense that they are just not cut out for this. This can cause real grief, since surely we are...
The One Craft That Really Matters
People bemoan the loss of craftsmanship, and rightly so. We wonder what has happened to pride and care about every little detail, just because. Indeed, too many have only read about such craftsmen. But there is something much deeper going on that often escapes our...
A Nightly Ritual for Married and Unmarried
What Aquinas writes about dreams is something we have all observed, and it calls for closer consideration: “those things which have occupied a man's thoughts and affections while awake recur to his imagination while asleep.” This implies that our nighttime dreams are...
Life After Death: Learning from Socrates
Socrates’s worldview never ceases to amaze me. As a Christian, I find the depth of his insight surprising, but more to the point, inspiring. If without divine revelation he discovered and lived out such convictions, how much more should I. There are several notable...
On Wanting a Good Wife
I think there is a danger for us in the two famous scriptural pericopes on a good woman, one in Proverbs 31 and the other in Sirach 26. I do not know what a woman thinks when she hears these remarkable texts. I want to consider how a man hears them. There is much...
A Moment That Says It All
It’s a stunning moment in one of the great books: Jim Hawkins doesn’t jump the stockade. The other day when reading Treasure Island aloud with the family, I fairly wanted to jump out of my skin when we came to it. For the fortunate hearer, a moment like this can...