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Woman in the Home: Making Life Each Day
“These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,--the complexion, the special flavor, the special happiness of...
A Year to Turn to the Household
Now it is best that there should be a public and proper care for such matters; but if they are neglected by the community it would seem right for each man to help his children and friends toward virtue... Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Being docile to reality means...
New Beginning in a Long Journey
The Magi are men who inquire into the nature of things philosophically... Rabanus There are few stories like that of three men who mysteriously appear from the ‘east’ and then disappear again in the mist of history. As a philosopher I take them as patron. In...
Christmas: The Perfect Subject for Meditation
Thus the Word of God while yet in the bosom of the Father was known to the Father alone; but when he was clothed with flesh as a word is clothed with a voice, then he was first made manifest and known... Thomas Aquinas For most of us meditation does not come easily....
A Plan for Winter: Receive the Gift of Slowdown
“We’ve gotten stuck in the summer mode, in chronic summer... In fall and winter we should move into a new mode, a contractive and restorative mode... like coming home at the end of the day... with a sense of settling, of slowing down, of peace, of belonging, of...
The Primacy of Contemplation
“Everything human is an overflow from contemplation... We so rarely grant contemplation its proper place. Yet it cannot overflow unless it has this place. Nevertheless, everything derives from its fulness...” Pierre T. Dehau, O.P. The waters of reality run deep....
Certain Things in Uncertain Times
“First house and wife and an ox for the plough.” Hesiod, Works and Days I think I am not alone in feeling unsettled these days. I experience a subtle, low-grade but constant stress, a sense of foreboding that tends toward fear. Where are things going in our nation and...
Knowing Where Our Food Comes From
“A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world form which food comes.” Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” in What are People For? There are very good reasons to consider where our food comes from. Let us...
When Medicine Becomes a Business
“And it belongs to...the medical art to produce health, not to make money. Nevertheless, some men turn every art into a means of money-making, as if this is the end.” Aristotle, Politics The state of medical practice in our country and in the world has been brought...
Announcing: Man of the Household Course NOW FREE
I have decided to make a big change at LifeCraft in order to bring my household courses to a broader audience. Troubled times call for a sober and serious response. Social and political dysfunction remind us that our households need to be a bastion of authentic human...
Friendship after the Election
“...but we do say that a city has concord when men have the same opinion about what is to their interest, and choose the same actions, and do what they have resolved in common.” “...for if people do not watch it carefully the common good is soon destroyed. The result...
Useless Houses
“Well then, Critobulus,” said Socrates, “what if I demonstrate that, in the first place, some people spend a lot of money on building useless houses, whereas others spend far less and build perfectly adequate houses?” Xenophon, The Estate Manager I wonder what...