Latest Posts
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…
Intentional Household: Book Now Available
Renewing life today must start in the home. This seems obvious, but it is much more demanding than it seems. Forging a homelife that answers to the richness of God’s plan requires an extraordinary, intentional effort. And this effort must be rooted in a clear…
Emmaus’ Lesson: Hospitality
Of the various appearances of the Lord after his resurrection, the story of the road to Emmaus is especially beloved. It seems unmatched for accessibility and richness of lessons. One lesson emphasized by two major fathers of the Church might take us by surprise: the…
The Word That Towers Over Betrayal
Wednesday of Holy Week is a day traditionally focused on the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. One of the great gifts of the story of the Passion, and our commemoration of it in Holy Week, is the various characters with whom we can identify ourselves, and who reveal…
Soul-Shaking Wonder at the Incarnation
One of the most remarkable features of human reality is how the supernatural relates to the natural. At once, the supernatural brings out what was somehow latent (and in a sense waiting!) in the natural, even as it stunningly transcends, and so also elevates and…