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:
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...
Intentional Friendship
“In choosing and testing friends you should not grow weary of caution, for the fruit of this labor is medicine for life and the most solid foundation for immortality.” Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship In his great treatise Aelred names four steps of true...
The Conversation of Friends
"...they have little taste for conversation, which especially seems to be the mark and cause of friendship." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics One of the most notable aspects of Aristotle’s understanding of true friendship is just how much it requires of a person. In this...
Recent Posts:
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...
Does God Care?
“What is more, the deity was not content to care for the body but, most important, also implanted in the human being the soul and made it dominant. …For is it not quite obvious to you that, in comparison with the other animals, humans live like gods, naturally...
Living with Yourself
“And a virtuous man wishes to live with himself; for he does so with pleasure, since the memories of his past acts are delightful and his hopes for the future are good, and therefore pleasant. His mind is well stored too with subjects of contemplation.” Aristotle,...
A Bright Lesson from Christmas Depression
“But a natural desire cannot be in vain.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae VIDEO FOLLOWED BY DISTINCT WRITTEN REFLECTION For those of us with some length of life experience, Christmas comes to be associated with suffering—whether our own or that of others we know....
A Virtue for the Holy Days
“Now we have said generally that the man with this virtue will associate with people in the right way [in gatherings and in social life]; but it is by reference to what is honorable and expedient that he will aim at not giving pain or at contributing pleasure. For he...
Directing Our Conversation
“Socrates’ own conversation was ever of human matters. Investigating what is pious, what is impious; what is beautiful, what is ugly; what is just, what is unjust; what is prudence, what is madness…
Thinking About Death–for the Sake of Life
“To hold aloof from death is to cheat oneself of the profoundest insight into one’s own personal reality.” Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality At issue for me is my avoidance behavior. Though in my mind I am convinced that I should think about my death, I really...
The Secret of the Marriage Bed
Penelope: “If really he is Odysseus, truly home, beyond all doubt we two shall know each other …. There are secret signs we know, we two.” … Odysseus: “There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign, built into that bed—my handiwork and no one else’s! An old trunk of...
The Suffering of Children
“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 My youngest son is doing very well today. Two weeks ago...
Living an Examined Life
"...the unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates in The Apology by Plato These words of Socrates are notoriously provocative. Perhaps they should provoke us. One implication of course is that an examined life is indeed worth living. But just what is an examined...