Most men feel it before they can name it. That slow, quiet sense that life is just happening to you. Work has become a treadmill, marriage a parallel operation, faith something rote and obligatory. John Heinen and Devin Schadt go deep on what's actually behind male drift and why the standard diagnosis misses the real problem entirely. They trace how the invention of adolescence quietly dismantled the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, why 59% of men between 24 and 29 don't actually feel like adults, and how men have been inheriting that deficit ever since. Today we unpack the distinction between vocation and occupation and why a man who has traded the first for the second will always feel like something is missing, no matter how much he achieves. We discuss Aquinas on the order of charity, what it means to have solid convictions versus just ambition, why hope requires something genuinely difficult to be real, and what St. Ambrose meant when he said the man rightly called a king is the one who makes his own body an obedient subject.

We know the temptations that hunt us, the ones we can't seem to outrun no matter how serious we get about our interior life. In this episode, John Heinen and Devin Schadt walk through a practical four-temptation framework with the corresponding virtues that combat each one. From lust as a disordered desire rather than a foreign attack, to the "respectable sin" of greed we praise as ambition, to the pride we cannot see in ourselves, to the sloth hiding inside our busiest days.

Anyone in a successful marriage will attest that love entails sacrifice. Cultivating stable, harmonious family bonds is a life-long challenge. While love is something to be embraced, limerence is something to be discarded.

Men can choose to live a mediocre life. We see this throughout our society, in our churches, and among our families and friends. The first step to changing this is waking up to the reality of this truth and becoming aware of how you are falling into the trap. Satan wants you to stay trapped in this state, and in today's episode, we discuss 3 signs that the devil has caught you. They are often subtle, but they are very prevalent in men's lives today.

Today Sam and John discuss addictions, what they are, how to define and understand them, and how to continuously work throughout life to overcome them as Catholic men. We go into the clear and clinical breakdown of addictions with a big 'A' versus a little 'a'. We discuss the difference between substance versus behavioral addictions and how to overcome each. How do we break free from that which is keeping us in bondage or tempting us to addictions and further comfort?

Have longed to be free of sexual sin? Have you found yourself confessing the same sexual sins over and over? Have you lost hope that you will ever be free from porn or other unwanted sexual behavior?  Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Jay Stringer, a psychotherapist and researcher who recently wrote a […]

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 […]

If you read anything by St. Francis de Sales, you come away with the impression that he was patience incarnate. He talks endlessly about the wonderful benefits of meekness, gentleness, and kindness—especially to those who deserve it least. Yet, many don’t realize that this great saint struggled for most of his life with a fiery temper […]