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.
Hope is the virtue that expects God’s help. It places it’s trust in Him, looks to heaven as our final end, and waits patiently for His answer to prayers for help here in this life.
The book of Proverbs says that 'Death and life are in the power of the tongue.' As you go about your day, you hear many use their words for good and for bad. Why is it bad? Why are certain words bad? Let's explore this.
Scrupulosity is the battle of overfocusing on not doing the wrong thing. Many men struggle with it in our Christian lives. How can we overcome the control that scrupulosity can have over us? It begins with prayer, but it can come through obedience of action and intelligence.
The ultimate responsibility as a father is to do everything one can to help lead their children to sainthood. Fathers need to help their children understand the reality of Hell. We need a heavenly perspective and goal fostered in our children.
Many of us are born into the mess called generational sin: The reality of a family or fatherly wound that often leads into sin for many generations. There are choices we can take to sever our relationship with these sins in our families.