What To Do?
My book on True Friendship sets out basic principles of friendship and how to pursue it. Click here to learn more about this book and my eight-segment video course of the same title from Catholic Courses. See below for featured Wednesday Quotes that address the theme of friendship.
Reconnecting in a Culture of Disconnection
Despite all the talk of relationship, today’s culture undermines real friendships at their root. True friendship remains possible if you begin by discovering what it is and requires.
Making Time and Space for Friendship
We often lack the contexts that enable friendship, and our practices from communication to recreation cripple our relationships. Learning a forgotten wisdom about friendship empowers you to forge it.
Overcoming Loneliness
The lack of meaningful relationships leaves us isolated and discouraged, like so many around us. True friendship is always possible if you make it a priority.
Featured Posts:
Having No Real Friends
“Those who have a host of friends and are on familiar terms with everybody seem to be real friends of no one.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics It is our worst nightmare. Everyone else has real friends. But somehow I don’t, because I’m just not up to it, or people just...
Our Pressing Need for Friendship
“Besides, friendship is especially necessary for living...” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics There are two reasons we might not give true friendship the priority it deserves. For some, it seems to us that we already have it. Or in any case, it is not evident to us that...
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...
Recent Posts:
Having No Real Friends
“Those who have a host of friends and are on familiar terms with everybody seem to be real friends of no one.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics It is our worst nightmare. Everyone else has real friends. But somehow I don’t, because I’m just not up to it, or people just...
The Gift of Kissing
“The physical kiss should be offered or accepted only for fixed and honest reasons.” Aelred of Rievaulx It seems to me that the topic of kissing calls for some clear thinking and straight talking. Kissing is clearly a gift to all of us. It is something of nature,...
When a Woman Says Yes
“...for a common life is above all things natural to the female and to the male.” Aristotle, Oeconomica One telling aspect of a marriage proposal is that the man usually has a bit to say. Even if he doesn’t actually put it all into words, he needs to be ready to give...
Our Pressing Need for Friendship
“Besides, friendship is especially necessary for living...” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics There are two reasons we might not give true friendship the priority it deserves. For some, it seems to us that we already have it. Or in any case, it is not evident to us that...
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...
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...
A Teacher to the End
“Yet even in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility and greatness of soul.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I didn’t realize how difficult it would be for me to...
Remembering Our Dead Daily
"I saw them in all the times past and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time..." Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow Some time ago it really struck me when reading Wendell Berry’s fiction how he portrayed growing old, and the deepening...
Desire Not in Vain
“Our (natural) desire cannot be empty and vain.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle has a remarkable sense of the human drama, of the gift and the challenge it is to be human. Not that the style or voice of his writing is itself dramatic. But if we look through...
Is Love Irrational?
“And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays. The more the pity that some honest neighbors will not make them friends.” Shakespeare (Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Lovers can be notoriously irrational. But is true love...
Choosing to be Present: The Power of Good-Will
“The beloved is said to be in the lover, inasmuch as the beloved is in the lover’s affections… [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.” “… in the love of friendship, the...
Presence Even in Absence: The Power of Friendship
“…the absent are present, the poor are rich, the weak are strong, and—even more difficult—the dead are alive.” Cicero, On Friendship In our times the issue of presence deserves special attention. What constitutes real human presence? Too often, it seems, those who are...