Latest Posts
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...
3 Reasons to Do a Staycation
By staycation I simply mean a sort of vacation done at home. It could be very short (even a day or two) or it could be a week or more. Ideally not a replacement but rather an addition to a vacation (a going way of some kind), a staycation can be an excellent...
Learning from Trees like St. Bernard
“He has no other teachers besides the oaks and beeches.” Words we might expect about Thoreau in fact are about one of the great Christian intellectuals of the Middle Ages. Today when a focus on trees too often betokens a turning away from the Creator of trees, we can...
Hospitality: The Deeper Challenge
There is more at stake in hospitality than meets the eye. The realm of hosting is a privileged context for discovering and enacting our human identity, which means also our divine calling. And home will always be the central place of hospitality. Guests are sent from...
Able to Choose the Right Words
I sat down to ponder an amazing proverb from Scripture about using words well. As I reflected, I was struck by another maxim: use it or lose it. Using words well is a prime example of a key human ability now critically threatened through lack of practice. Two factors...
Losing Sleep Over ‘Educating’ Our Children
My father-in-law once explained why he wanted to ‘homeschool’ when almost no one else in the state was doing so. “I wanted my children to be like their mother rather than like the teachers in the schools.” Whether this was or is the best practical conclusion, it in...
A Divine Plan for Changing Diapers
There is always a reason for the way things are, even when this is not apparent. An easily missed aspect of the natural order of household life offers a standout example of this truth. In short, the things we must do to address our bodily needs offer a perfect context...
To Become a Witness to Mercy Today
Home is our workshop of life, and we are artisans. We discover, pattern and forge--for spouses, friends, children and others--the key features of a human life. In an unforgettable line, St. Benedict enunciates a key to the whole project: “Never despair of God’s...