We have handicapped children by letting our concern for their safety overrule the enormous benefits that come with the way they naturally play. Last semester, some of our faculty recently participated in on-site CPR training on a Saturday morning. And again, this semester, on a Friday evening. Aside from the comfort you should derive knowing [...]
St. Benedict’s civilized communities remind us that personal virtue is vital for a civilisation of decency, order, and peaceful prosperity. A Christian needs to listen to God, listen to the Scriptures, listen to the Church and listen to the Holy Spirit within us. Then comes action. In the summer of 1987 I had three months [...]
The recovery of fatherhood is not merely a political and sociological challenge, to be met by strengthening the legislation that keeps families together, deters separation, and insists that a man takes more responsibility for his children. What needs to be recovered is a vision, a sense of responsibility, a “creative vow.” The collapse of marriage in [...]
Each year the third Sunday in June is designated as Father’s Day, a day on which we honor our Nation’s fathers for everything they do for their families and for America. Today fatherhood is sometimes drily described as a craft or an occupation, something which competes with career or outside pursuits for time and attention. [...]
All the immortal myths, sagas, and fairytales we locate in the world of make-believe are retold in the Bible. Likewise with our school's recent production of "The Sound of Music," whose Cinderella story of the pure maid who hears a call from God echoes unconsciously into their lives in a classical Catholic academy. The [...]
Because life often comes at you very fast, the cleaning of a khaki couch, like the cleansing of Augean stables, is a task that often waits for a hero’s journey. Or at least a lot of free time. This trembling period of early Covid insanity was one such time in which I felt both impulses. [...]
What we need in American society are more imaginative resources for thinking about marriage and the great slog of parenthood. We need stories, plays, movies, and shows about the sort of heroism that requires long-haul fortitude and not just courage in the moment. A long-held but somewhat flexible fantasy I have engaged in periodically since [...]
To the philosopher, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. — Emerson What is wisdom? I feel like a droplet of spray which proudly poised for a moment on the crest of a wave, undertakes to analyze the sea. Ideally, wisdom is total [...]
Wilhelm Röpke grew mesmerized by population growth projections which counted 300 billion inhabitants on the Earth by the year 2300. In such an anthill existence, he asked, what would happen to those “unbought graces of life”: “nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure.” Wilhelm Röpke was an [...]
Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]
The planting of trees in the orchard—the passing down of tradition, of the moral wisdom of the past, of the torch of life, and of the beauty of life’s simplest but richest and pleasures—produces the great harvest of joy that culminates in the final chapters of the "Odyssey." Editor’s Note: This is the final essay [...]
Our kids don’t need arguments, they need a childhood. They need to have their healthy imaginations nourished and their innate prejudices in favor of truth, beauty, and goodness affirmed. It’s hard to be a kid these days. Your blue-haired teachers appear on Libs of Tik-Tok videos bragging about selling you into sex slavery, and people [...]
To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region. Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades, one of the most compelling is Robert Nisbet’s: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection [...]
Ultimately, the two catecheses—of our Faith and our civilization—should go hand-in-hand. That’s the way it’s always been: the West informed our Faith, and our Faith has indelibly formed the West. If we want both to survive, and perhaps flourish in America, our children will need the intellectual and cultural tools and imagination that a true [...]