In December I shared the first part of Evangeline’s story with you. I told you how questions arose about my daughter’s health during the pregnancy and how she was born with a large bump on her lower back. I told you how I almost passed out in the delivery room and how I wondered what the Lord was trying to tell us with our new daughter’s name...

My viewpoint of Father’s Day began to change on April 1, 1966 when the first of our three sons, Ed, was born. We named him after my father who, for reasons we will never know, ended his own life several months prior to my eighth birthday. I grew up as the fifth of six children in a single-parent home in the small town of Lawler in northeast Iowa...

It’s the New Year!  Woohoo!  Did you do anything?  Make a resolution?  Look at every other Catholic website that says “Don’t Make a Resolution!” and wonder what’s next? In all the gloriousness of Christmas and the New Year, did you notice the Feast day sandwiched in between?  The Feast of the Holy Family—the first Sunday after Chr...

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.  – St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:11) Dear fathers, mothers, and those that come from them – read this book! Every healthy society throughout history has had cultural and ceremonial rites of passa...

            Today is the feast day of St. Luke the Evangelist. His gospel is filled with numerous observations and meditations about God as our heavenly Father. A closer reading of St. Luke’s gospel gives us a better idea about the specific characteristics of God who is truly Our Father in the Lord’s Prayer, God the Father almighty ...

Let me begin with a story, that you may have heard before. It concerns a father and his son. This man and his son had suffered a great loss because the father’s wife, the mother of the family had died. So too had the eldest son. Now, it was only the father and the son left. As the family had been reduced to two from four, and to cope with the emp...

There are two competing images of fatherhood in Genesis, and this is related to the theme of dominion– who has it, what is the nature of it, and how it is exercised.  For the two images of fatherhood we can use the word dominion to describe the first image of life-giving fatherhood and dominationto describe the tyrannical view of fatherhood and...

In a technological world of instant gratification, it has become very difficult to be patient for anything to come full circle, whether it’s personal goals or products arriving in the mail.  The patient man or woman is usually a simple man or woman with the ability to understand the beauty of the process; not just the outcome. I am not patien...

When I was young, there was a shelf in our living room that had a bunch of random stuff on it. Among the odd items was a smooth rock with a simple phrase painted on it: “When giving your children the things you never had, don’t forget to give them the things you did have.” I think it has been 30 years since I last saw that knickknack, so I ma...

When our wedding day was approaching I thought (though I would not have said it out loud) that I was going to be an awesome husband.  Same thing when we were preparing for our first child to be born.  I thought I was going to be the best dad, always caring, always affectionate, always there as the best version of myself. Fast forward 5 years.....