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There is always the temptation to keep score. Every little disagreement becomes a legal discussion, and you try so hard to win the case and walk away victorious. But it costs you.

‘‘Train up a child in the way he should go; for even when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). My parents placed this bible verse at my bedside table when I was very young. It remained there my entire childhood, and I saw it every night before I went to […]

I was engaged to be married when I was 22, which I understood to be the achievement of manhood. The better part of my teenage years were spent preparing for that moment. This was it, I told myself, I was finally going to be a man. I was ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready […]

In one way or another, we fathers have to contend with the question of modesty in dress. I hope to formulate the concept of modesty in a positive light, as a virtue by which we show respect to that which deserves respect, a virtue that makes use of hiddenness to show forth the resplendence of […]

Unmarried men have the potential to be extremely selfish. There is no one depending on them, no child to take care of in the middle of the night, no wife to force compromise on a TV show. Single guys make their own schedule, and even when they do acts of charity or apostolic work, they make it fit into what they want to do.

Unmarried men have the potential to be extremely selfish. There is no one depending on them, no child to take care of in the middle of the night, no wife to force compromise on a TV show. Single guys make their own schedule, and even when they do acts of charity or apostolic work, they make it fit into what they want to do.

There is much talk about being a ‘real man’: the warrior man, the man without emotions or sympathies, the rival of all things deemed weak. Yet this kind of polemic is a form of extremism—and extremism is the devil’s playground. Satan thrives in extremes. He despises virtue and constantly goads us toward deficiency on one side or excess on the other.

Women who stay home do so from a natural and holy urge, but they are made constantly to feel as if they should be doing something of “actual value” out in the world.  Obviously, to a Catholic with even the slightest formation knows the dignity of motherhood is above all other vocations.  There is not a higher work.