Penance and mortification are key aspects to a healthy spiritual life. What have you done lately?
Today, Holy Mother Church celebrates the feast of St. Lucy, patron saint of — among others — the blind.
While looking at the calendar a few days ago and taking note of this feast day, I was prompted to recall an encounter I had ten years ago.
After graduating college, I got a job teaching Religion at Good Counsel High School, a girls’ school on the Northwest Side of Chicago run by the Felicians Sisters.
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To circumcise or not to circumcise.
I’m curious to get the perspectives of other Catholic Dads on the issue of circumcision.
Like the vast majority of American men born in the 1970s, I was circumcised as a newborn. For a long time, it was my impression that everybody did it, and so I never really gave it much thought as to whether it was a good idea or not.
In essence, then, my default opinion on whether or not parents should circumcise their newborn sons was:
“Why not?”
But after the birth of our first child (a girl), we switched doctors to a general practitioner who also delivers babies. Himself a Catholic father with a large family, he had been recommended by a few friends of ours, and both my wife and I immediately took a liking to his overall approach to medical care, and, in particular, to childbirth.
During our initial visit with him (when Jocelyn was pregnant with our second child), the issue of circumcision came up, and he said he doesn’t do it. [...]
If I recall, I think Rob had a post a while back encouraging the other Catholic Dads to share stories of how our lives had been influenced by a particular priest — what with this being the Year of the Priest and all. In that vein, here’s my contribution. Around Christmastime of 1999, during my [...]
There’s an excellent column posted recently on National Review titled “Getting Serious about Pornography”. It begins: Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a man’s perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and [...]
Mark Shea recently drew attention to some remarks by Mars Hill Pastor Mark Driscoll: In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament), Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship [...]
Recently, our seven-year old daughter Teresa — our firstborn child — learned to knit. In itself, this is really no big deal, I suppose, given that it’s hardly unheard of for a child to know how to knit. But for me, as her dad, the thing that struck me about her newfound ability is that [...]
In the original version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or rather, in the original version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) the entry for Earth consisted of one word: “Harmless”. In the revised edition, it was amended to: “Mostly harmless”. Much the same could be [...]
How could anyone have ever known that there’s a connection between early exposure to TV and later problems with attention span? Call it the perfect storm of parenting. Who doesn’t want to believe that there is a magical, wondrous, no-parental-guidance-required product that will turn their kids into Mensa members? The combination of our lack of [...]
My parents came in from Minneapolis yesterday, and they’ll be staying with us for the next week. (Happily, this will allow them to join us for the St. John Cantius Parish picnic this Sunday, which The Dutchman posted about yesterday.) Knowing that our eldest daughter Teresa just learned to ride a bike a couple weeks [...]
As today is the feast of St. Josemaria Escriva (the founder of Opus Dei), I’ve been looking for quotes from him to post on Facebook throughout the day as a way of exposing more people to his great writings (and ultimately, one hopes, to help bring them to a deeper relationship with Our Lord and [...]
