Photo: Courtesy stanleyrother.org The country church is red brick, its steeple a stout weathervane amid storms on the Oklahoma plains. In 1937, Stanley Rother was baptized as an infant beneath its roof in the village of Okarche. In 1981, Father Stanley Rother was killed by a death squad at Atitlán, Guatemala. Today, he is known as Blessed Stan...

A priest friend of mine says very regularly, “All of us are called to holiness.”  This is a constant call of his, showing up in nearly every sermon, a preaching of a main theme of Vatican Council II.  “Great.  We get it,” I said one day.  “Now tell us what to do.” Men (male and female) are body and soul.  We have a physicality t...

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.....

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,...

Mr. Brian Jones There will be many of them soon, and only a few, in retrospect, will be worth listening to or reading. Of course, I am speaking of the college commencement address. Commencement speeches are delivered by individuals that a university has decided best imitates the school’s various missions. Only in rare instances does a commence...

Very often I encounter Catholic men that desire to grow in holiness- whether this is to learn more about their faith, grow in prayer or tackle a serious sin in their life- but very often they are not sure exactly where to start. The challenge can be overwhelming (especially if we have been away from the faith for a while), and what we can see so...

“A man who governs his passions is master of the world.  We must either command them, or be enslaved by them.” – St. Dominic I once fouled out of a basketball game in 8th grade and ended up in the bleachers during my protest before the whistle even finished blowing. That was me in 8th grade. You can imagine it didn’t get better any time...

Recently I saw a preview for a TV show about a band of geniuses saving the world with, ya know, facts and math and stuff. In one scene a divorced mother was explaining her desire to move closer to her son’s father. A lead character (one of the “geniuses”) thought it was a horrible idea.  The emotional mother explained that the boy should be ...

There are few things more difficult for the climber than attempting to answer the question of why he climbs. Yet there are few things more intuitive for him than the need to do so. He remains a paradox to himself. What follows is an attempt to resolve the seeming contradiction of his existence. A climb is a response. It is an action in response...

There is a great temptation in all of us to reduce all of our lives to a checklist. All I need is to get this or that set of things done, and then my life is complete. I will be a millionaire by the time I am 30. I am going to get married (or not get married) until my late twenties. I will retire by 55.  I know a whole lot of people that live by...