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.....

Because I did not grow up in a traditional parish system, complete with schools connected to the parish you attend, I don’t naturally have affection for parochial schools.  I am well aware of the good that they did and continue to do, especially in providing halfway decent education to inner-city children in a few places.  I also know, howe...

I had a professor in college who came in to class after watching the first Jason Bourne movie. “My life is so boring when compared to Jason Bourne…” He was a dad of five small children, he lived in an uneventful quiet neighborhood, and he taught us Literature and Math. To him that was a boring life, or at least an uneventful one. At the time,...

In an interesting and passing comment in Rerum Novarum, Pope St. Leo XIII says that children “continue [a father’s] personality.”  He is not speaking about his specific and unique personality, like being melancholic or something, but in that a child does carry forward the person of his father in his ways of life and character.  Children lea...

The average father cannot easily face the challenges he intuits, because he doesn’t understand them. And it is not because he is unintelligent, but because the force that has overtaken the totality of the developed world is too often unrecognized.  We don’t realize it in the same way we don’t realize air – its total presence is such a give...

“Turn left! Watch out, there is a bomb right next to your elbow!” If you had been on the Father/Son retreat I led out on a farm in Virginia a couple of years ago you would have heard these and similar words as fathers guided their blindfolded sons through a “minefield” as the boys scurried around trying to collect candy. If they bumped into...

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can completely crush you.  Like red and green signs over a road, an understanding of their power is necessary for life. They should be like darts aiming for a target, not like a released balloon flailing about getting spittle-filled air everywhere. When you become a mentor, your words take on a ...