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:
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:
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 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. Christmas depression is proverbial, and it is...
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...
