Reconnecting in a Culture of Disconnect
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.
What can I do?
STEP 1: Start by reading Our Pressing Need for Friendship, which outlines why it’s so important to prioritize friendship in our lives.
STEP 3: Watch this video discussion on the value and art of cultivating deep conversations and authentic friendship as the path for authentic human flourishing.
STEP 4: Evaluate how you act to former friends. See Aristotle’s advice in Living with Former Friends.
STEP 5: See below for featured Wednesday Quotes that address the theme of friendship and how to forge strong friendships today.
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:
Stronger than Fortune
“But the category of friends, which is truly the most holy of desirable things—this is not assigned to Fortune’s list but to Virtue’s.” Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy One of our greatest fears is of bad things that happen to our friends and loved ones. In a great...
Making the Times that Matter
“There is a valley in south England remote from ambition and from fear...” Hilaire Belloc, 'The Mowing of a Field' Reading a Belloc essay aloud is one of my favorite things to do with students in my home—or in this case around a bonfire. Such readings were very...
Friendship: To Guard the Young from Straying
“Friendship helps the young, too, to keep from error.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is intent on showing how friendship is necessary in every stage and condition in life. With characteristic insight, he points to the precise need it fulfills in each....
The Ultimate Key to Vision, and Relationship
"But love... adds a precious seeing to the eye..." Shakespeare "Where there is love, there is vision." Thomas Aquinas We humans are made to see. We are also made to be seen. I think that often what really hurts us in our relationships is that we do not feel...
Three Beautiful Things in the Cosmos
“My soul takes pleasure in three things, and they are beautiful in the sight of the Lord and of men; agreement between brothers, friendship between neighbors, and a wife and a husband who live in harmony.” Sirach I wonder what these words sound like to the young. I...
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...