During the week I’ve seen numerous responses of outrage connected to Beyoncé’s halftime show. The nature of that performance is just another example of the many challenges we face as fathers. Trying to help our children develop an appropriate sense of self and cultivate the virtue of modesty is hard.

So what’s a dad to do?

In a New York Times article, David Brooks summarizes the findings of Christian Smith’s book. Lost In Transition.  The book is concerned with young adults’ beliefs about the moral life.  David writes, ‘the results are depressing.’  The basic premise of the article (and the book) is that we as a culture have failed the younger generation in giving them the framework to judge between what is right and what is wrong—i.e., about the good life. The youth in Christian’s study, 230 young adults ages 18-23, simply lacked the ‘categories or vocabulary’ to even speak about moral issues.

What is the #1 challenge facing fathers today?  This is a difficult question to answer for many reasons, especially because all families are different with different issues and struggles.  And yet, I think that some issues and struggles affect most, if not every father of this day and age in particular. Many challenges could possibly qualify including:

~ How does a father talk to his children about sex in a sex-saturated culture targeted more and more towards kids?

~ How much does a father censor what his children are exposed to online, on TV, and with their friends?

~ How does a father impart the value of the Catholic Bible, the lives of the saints, and other elements of faith to his children in a country which is becoming more and more secular?

We don’t do a lot of politics here. This isn’t Catholic Vote, it’s Catholic Dads. I am not going to go into a list of why, from a Catholic perspective, one candidate (Romney) is better than the other (Obama). There are sites that do that (the Catholic Hispanic Leadership Alliance has a good breakdown). Still, politics is part of every man’s life including, perhaps especially, dads.

Today I gave a short talk in a University courtyard on “how guys should treat girls.” As I was preparing my presentation it occurred to me that I really wanted to sit down with a small group of Catholic Dads and shoot the breeze over this  before I wrote or spoke about it. Leaving the topic of [...]

Gentlemen, I have a recommendation for you. It is at a blog by a Catholic mother called My Broken Fiat. The particular post is titled My Darkest Secret. It describes the pain of a woman caused by her husband’s selfishness.

Would you pay for Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus and call it justice?

Of course you wouldn’t. No decent human being could conscience that. It’s just wrong. It’s a matter of principle and basic civil rights. Relieving her of an obligation to pay the fare while simultaneously requiring her to sit in the back would not respect her dignity as a human being.

Unfortunately, that is precisely what is going on with the HHS mandate [...]

This was kind of exciting so I had to share it with you. CBS Washington published a despicable photo spread of the March For Life in which only pro-choice demonstrators were shown instead of the 400,000 pro-life marchers. The resulting hue and outcry from pro-lifers was swift and terrible, flooding the comment boxes and grabbing [...]

When should you open your mouth?

We were simply commiserating over children when she blurted it out. “You know my children were conceived by in vitro fertilization don’t you?”

I was stunned into silence. What could I say? [...]

Gentlemen, I need your help.

The focus of my PhD is the question “is there a Catholic view of Masculinity?” Part of my research is reading on gender identity, particularly relating to masculinity. When I saw that the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRS) have released a discussion paper titled “Protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex and/or gender identity” I thought I had better read it. Discussion papers are important stages in policy development in Australia so, when a body as important at the AHRS write a paper on this, you can count on somebody bringing it to parliament sooner or later.