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:
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...
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...
Recent Posts:
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...
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....