What Jayber Crow Can Teach Us About the Priesthood and Celibacy
As someone who sees perennial bachelorhood as a societal sickness, recommending Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry might seem counterproductive. Jayber, Berry’s main character in the novel, is a small-town barber that finds himself an “ineligible bachelor,” as he puts it. He never marries, never has kids, and in that way is “free” of the bu...
Murderous Mama’s Boys: Johnny Cash, the Wu Tang Clan, and Other Wisdom on Mass Shooters
The New York Post ran an article recently by Maureen Callahan called Why Are Young American Men So Angry? She noted that mass shooters are fitting a common pattern, which flows into their general disposition of being angry: From those mass shooters who have attacked the innocent before, we know it’s a specific strain of anger — deep, repress...
Nice Guys Finish Last
The other day a lady described a man she had met and I was about to see again. Her description was summed up at the end by, “he is a nice guy.” I shuddered a bit and reconsidered my options. Was this man really someone I wanted to meet? Then that got me thinking, why is it almost an insult to call a man a “nice guy”? There is nothing inhere...
What I’m Giving Up For Lent This Year: Control
One of the most noticeable changes in the liturgical calendar following the Second Vatican Council was the removal of the pre-lenten season of Septuagesima. This short season consisting of only three Sundays - Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima - served a preparatory function as the Church embarked on the penances of Lent. The Gloria cease...
Altar Serving is For Boys Because Saying Mass is a Man’s Job
Wise cultures don’t let boys idle long – as boys that is. If you let them idle, that unnecessary phase of “adolescence” creeps in. Adolescence, an invention of unhealthy cultures wherein boyhood is extended as far as possible into would-be adulthood, is an enemy of maturity. Once a boy comes to a physical strength and mental capacity ...
Great Men and Women: You Can’t Have One Without the Other
Husbands, fathers, brothers, friends... we need to strive to be strong men and help cultivate the next generation of men. We are surrounded by too many males who do not understand their natural roles or just choose to abdicate their responsibilities because society has told them that the truth about being a man has somehow changed. We are being ask...
5 Ways to Develop the Virtue of Magnanimity
Each and every one of us are called by Almighty God to be holy. We are called to be saints. To reach such sublime heights, one can say that we are called to be great. This greatness is what is referred to as the virtue of Magnanimity – which translates to ‘greatness of soul’. It was St. Thomas Aquinas who said, in his Summa Theologica, that m...
Christ’s Masculinity: A Model for Educating Boys
Ezra Pound was born in Idaho—but you wouldn’t know it to hear him speak. The American poet (1885-1972) set sail for Europe in 1908 and spent a large part of the rest of his life bouncing around the continent with an accent as strange and difficult to pin down as he was. Pound is hailed as a leader in literary modernism and was responsible for j...
Male Strength Has Purpose and Should Not Be Suppressed
On his radio talk show Metaxas Talk, the evangelical Christian, author and public intellectual Eric Metaxas has made the case that feminism arose from a genuine problem on the part of men, namely the misuse of their male strength. Himself a critic of feminism, however, Metaxas maintains that while the feminist’s diagnosis of the problem was cor...
A Call to Pastors: Reach Out to Your Men
You guys all know, if you happen to go to Mass on a regular basis, that the majority of faithful Mass goers are women…especially at daily Mass. Chances are, the parish is run by women as well, apart from the pastor. I remember my first assignment as a missionary and realizing there was only one or two women that would serve daily Mass. Where are ...