I wait all summer for this time of year, when the heat finally breaks. Towards the end of August there’s a little something in the air that’s different, a hint that someday it will be safe to wear sweaters again. It’s not actually any cooler, but the breeze seems to hold a promise for the […]

Our oldest daughter left our homeschool this year and started “real” high school. She’s been treking from class to class for about a month now, and this week her great secret was exposed: she doesn’t have a cell phone. It came up in her debate class, while the teacher was apparently trying to draw the […]

I couldn’t think of an exciting topic to discuss this week, so I thought I’d put together a list of a few resources that I’ve been enjoying lately, some for homeschooling, some for personal growth. In no particular order, here they are. If you’ve ever wanted to read Dante’s Divine Comedy felt too intimidated, this […]

I’ve read a good bit of Wendell Berry’s writing in the past, but most of my focus was on his essays. The Unsettling of America, which I think I could still find blindfolded in the Jones Creek Library in Baton Rouge, formed the way I think about culture and the land. On the other hand, […]

I came across this passage in one of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns for the Catholic Worker paper the other day, written when she was staying with her daughter before the birth of her third grandchild: “It has been a month of ‘ice, rains, snow and stormy winds,’ and every morning after the routine of fires, […]

I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion […]

We studied the Holocaust in our homeschool a little while back. It was hard in so many ways, (how do you explain so much evil to children?) but it was past time I came back to it myself, and definitely time my older girls started to learn about it. One of the things I had […]

Obedience is a word that feels a little outdated in our culture today. When “living your best life” so often means “going your own way” and trying to just “be you,” to whom could we possibly owe obedience?

This happened at our dinner table this week. The twelve-year-old wandered off. (Usually not a cause for concern – usually she would be in search of more water, or a condiment, or the bathroom.) After a few minutes I said, “Where’s Samantha?” Not in the kitchen. No one was sure where she had gone. Shortly […]

I heard a homily recently centered around the idea of the “next right thing,” or “one small change.” When I got home and turned to the reflection book I’ve been praying with at night, I found this: “The solution proposed in the Gospels is that of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy. It is […]