The Antidote to News: Real Life Here and Now
Wise men and the purveyors of contemporary culture recognize the same dramatic truth. We are addicted to news. Probably unlike the purveyors, the wise perceive the root of the addiction and so can offer something the purveyors don’t want—a path to freedom. Over...
The Best Reason to Read Aloud Together
There is nothing quite like the silence that comes over the room at the close of the final sentence. For a brief yet timeless stretch we are all there together, highly aware of one another but in wonderful solitude. Then, the conversation begins. The power of reading...
That I Might Be Seen
The hard conversation with a loved one comes to an impasse. A welter of feelings resolves into one overriding pain: I don’t feel seen. In the end the greatest suffering is to be, or feel, alone. And to feel unseen is the very heart of loneliness. Josef Pieper...
2 Gifts of Winter
Many today yearn to live closer to ‘nature:’ a term, nay, a reality with many rich, diverse aspects. From primitive diets and organic farming to bare foot shoes, cold showers and breastfeeding, trends indicate a growing sense that nature, and particularly human...
Self-Care: 2 Principles of a Higher Approach
Popular trends today reveal that human nature is always ‘at work’ in people, inclining us toward various good things. At the same time, these trends can illustrate how misconceptions and disordered desires can taint or pervert such good inclinations. A growing...
One Life Lesson from the Magi
Well into January Christians have always focused on one of the strangest stories in the New Testament: the mysterious men from the East. Somehow this story brings Christmas to our daily life. Fathers of the Church found many lessons in the pilgrimage of the Magi,...
Longing for Home at Christmastime
Home is like heaven. What more is there to say? Dickens’s immortal short story of Christmas goes to the deepest longings of the human heart. This stands to reason, as the great drama of human life is always a drama of home, and home-coming. And this tends to come to...
The Gift God Offers at Christmastime
We are rightly reminded at Christmas to keep in mind the reason for the season, or the reality that we are celebrating. A less-considered but related angle is that our very celebrating can and should change us. Or in any case it can dispose us for what often escapes...
Carrying the Dead with Us at Christmas
It is not an accident that Christmas makes us think of times gone by, and especially of people gone by. Perhaps we experience this as a sort of cruel twist as we get older. We might wonder why it can’t be like it was before, when ‘everyone’ was there. There is much...
Christmas Calls for Tradition and Creativity
The story is told of the family that year after year, regardless of the neighbors raising questions, was true to their tradition of cutting the leg of a pig a little shorter than normal butchering practice. Eventually it came to light that their particular practice...
Singing in the Home: Is It Essential?
“Only the lover sings.” Though St. Augustine’s rightly famous words strike us as true, we perhaps do not immediately grasp a corollary: love calls for and even demands singing. To sing—at least in a certain way—both expresses and cultivates the very love from which it...
Recovering Leisure at Thanksgiving: Planning Spontaneity
It is one of the great crises of our day, the more serious for its being largely unnoticed. The lack of truly ‘free time’ in our life is masked by our referring to chunks of our time as ‘free.’ But for several generations, wise observers have pointed to a radical new...