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Christmas, and Longing for Home
“I have come to bring you home, dear Brother! ... Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!” A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens Home is like heaven. What more is there to say? Dickens’s...
Winter Cherries and the Gift of Christmas
“All these years we’ve been so generous. I’m afraid we’ve given all our wealth away. I’m afraid we have no more to give.” Winter Cherries, as told by Odds Bodkin May this problem—one that brings into focus an amazing aspect of the gift of Christmas—be one we might...
To Bring Singing into Our Homes Again
In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle makes a commonsense suggestion so simple we might miss its power and urgency. Make face to face conversations normal again. Here I offer a corollary suggestion. Make face to face...
Tell Your Daughter She’s Beautiful
How can women come to have a proper perception of their own beauty? I have a suggestion toward a partial answer. A great beginning is that fathers learn to see their daughters' beauty; and then tell them. I think we fathers too easily forget that insistent voices are...
Where Complementarity Comes Home
“From the beginning, family duties are distinct; some are proper to the husband, others to the wife. Thus mutual needs are provided for, when each contributes his own services to the common good.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics There isn’t anything else quite like it....
Ordinary Means for an Extraordinary Holiday Season
“We must also remember that no metamorphosis since pre-historic times is in any way comparable to the metamorphosis that we are now undergoing.” “[Man is] a creature which is not only capable of gratuitous acts but of which it can be said that such acts are this...
Presence when Absent: A Husband’s Gift
“The beloved is said to be in the lover… [even] in the absence of the beloved, because of the lover’s longing towards…the good he wills to the beloved with a love of friendship.” Thomas Aquinas One thing my marriage has taught me is that really ‘being-present’ to...
Does Everyone Need an Obi-wan?
“And if someone dragged him away from there by force, up the rough, steep path, and didn’t let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be pained and irritated at being treated that way?” Socrates, Plato’s Republic We seldom reflect on a stark...
Teaching Like Socrates
“Is questioning an educational process, Ischomachus? I’m asking because I’ve just understood your method of questioning me. You take me through points that I know, you show me that these points are no different from points I’d been thinking that I didn’t know, and...
Does Getting Married Mean Giving Up Dreams?
Over the years, I, and many others I know, both before and after getting married, have grappled with the issue of giving up dreams. It is difficult and nuanced. And it is especially important for how we think about, and live, marriage. My basic conviction is this: the...
Who Is Taking Care of My Wife?
“... surely every care should be taken on behalf of our own children’s mother...” Aristotle, Economics It can seem a flaw in nature’s plan. Those that attend most to the needs of others—especially children, and the weak and suffering—often want for such attention to...
To Hear the Call of the Leaves
“It is no wonder, then, that at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of autumn, and all men feel them.” Hilaire Belloc,...