by Pepper Martin At Ranch, this past summer a fellow captain from New York said to me something he had heard, “home is where you go when you are tired of being nice to people.” I shared this with my Exodus 90 group this past weekend and it got quite a chuckle out of everyone. The reason why it was so funny is because often it is so true.  S...

This article was originally published in Sword & Spade magazine.   Brian Speck tells how adopting a son with attachment disorders held great challenges. But then the story changed.   I converted to Catholicism in 2000 after marrying my wife, Leslie. For the first 15 years of our marriage I prioritized my career over my fai...

One of the cruelest self-delusions of divorcing parents is that “children are resilient.”  What is usually meant by that is that children will “recover” from the harm caused by divorce.  Those kids, after all, surely want the same thing that their parents want for them: to be happy.  This is yet another example of the modern vice of subo...

This article was originally published in Sword & Spade Magazine. Peter Gagnon, Fraternus Captain and father of 7, learned  new lessons in leading while bound to a bed with cancer.  I have always taught my children to meet challenges head on, but “teaching” took on a whole new look when I entered the darkest and most painful part of ...

by Pepper Martin My wife and I practice natural family planning, but that wasn’t always the case.  Natural family planning (NFP) is a method for understanding and working with natural fertility cycles within a marriage. We have done this for about 8 years now.  We were not always obedient to the truth in this area of our marriage.  (I know ...

Adapted from Michael Naughton’s Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2019) and previously published in Sword & Spade magazine.  The importance of the Sabbath and my need for Sunday became clear to me in 1999. Ironically, it was the year I received my first sabbatical (a word with the same...

This article was originally published in Sword & Spade magazine. by Charles Rumore The family has a regular opportunity for festivity: the evening meal. This daily event encapsulates all the elements intrinsic to authentic festival – temporal and spiritual purpose, preparation, community, rest, rejuvenation, reflection, conversation, an...

This article was published in Sword & Spade magazine. Jeremy DiPiazza, Fraternus Captain, realized what was  missing from his kids’ Catholic school education. ‘‘Train up a child in the way he should go; for even when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). My parents placed this bible verse at my bedside table whe...

This article was originally published in Sword & Spade magazine. A financial advisor notices how many men have  gained the world but lost their kids. by Justin Biance Raising children is an adventure, to say the least. A more appropriate description might be to say it is an ongoing experiment. Whether it is discipline, education, or t...

This article was originally published in Sword & Spade magazine. Dr. Jared Staudt speaks out about what is really happening in true education.  I have been working in catechesis for almost twenty years. Anyone involved in religious education can tell you that we have a crisis on our hands. Our programs do not produce adult Catholics or l...