When you work with your hands, you channel the way you’re made in the image and likeness of God. You resemble God the Father pouring Himself out in creativity, in divine generation.

In our attempt to revitalize masculinity in contemporary, secular society, there is an enduring threat. In trying to rediscover a robust, Catholic understanding of manliness, we might oversimplify it or flatten it out. We tend to emphasize aspects of masculinity that appeal to us personally, and latch on to cultural trends that correspond with our […]

So many men today walk around as if they have it all figured out and they don’t have a problem in the world. The “strong” silent type if you will. I know this for a fact. I used to do the same thing. So much of my life was spent walking like a one man army, convincing myself that I didn’t need anybody or anything.

The kids were out of control and so were the bills, my relationship with my wife felt strained, and I honestly didn’t think I could handle the stress at work anymore. I’ll never forget the day it all seemed to come crashing together. It looked like an ugly self-portrait, an American Gothic with me holding […]

As someone who sees perennial bachelorhood as a societal sickness, recommending Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry might seem counterproductive.  Jayber, Berry’s main character in the novel, is a small-town barber that finds himself an “ineligible bachelor,” as he puts it.  He never marries, never has kids, and in that way is “free” of the burdens […]

Within contemporary culture, manhood has been placed in a box, and a quite small one at that. The only accepted version of a real man is one-dimensional: aggressive, musclebound, dangerous, and unfeeling.   In saner times this was not so. There were many archetypes of manhood. The warrior. The poet. The philosopher. The king. While some exceptional men […]

Some years back, I heard a priest say something shocking during a homily. It was before I was Catholic, and I was present at the Mass on a holy day of obligation as a way of keeping a faux peace in my marriage. My wife converted to Catholicism in 2004, a year before we met, and, […]

They confess to looking at pornography and masturbating. It’s awkward, I know, to say it so candidly, but the only way to defeat pornography in our lives is to admit that we have a widespread problem with it. Vice, Firmly Entrenched By the time I was in high school, the habit of lusting after women via […]