I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
The Catholic Creatives Salon invites you to read the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins together in Season 14. Love, love, love his poetry…can’t wait to share it!
For an Apostles of the Interior Life Women’s Retreat, where the theme was “The King Desires Your Beauty,” I prepared this truly interesting talk. Will you believe me when I say that this is another of my favorites?!?! I know, I’ve said that about a lot of these talks, but revisiting them to give a […]
Gosh, I enjoy giving papers at C.S. Lewis Conferences! But it’s expensive. Most of those who do it have, it seems, college department budgets paying their expenses. For an amateur Lewis ‘scholar,’ it’s hard to get there from here. I’ve been lucky to have a C.S. Lewis studies class nearby so as to become a […]
I gave this talk as a retreat for the Daughters of Isabella during their Day of Reflection. Later on, when I was asked to contribute to the Catholic Truth Society’s Deeper Christianity Series, I was so thankful to have this structure to draw on for that booklet. Without this talk, Making Sunday Special could not […]
This ‘Triangle Talk’ is a way of speaking about the interiority and freedom of the human person. It’s something of a beginner’s guide to the interior life. It gives us a very easy-to-use ‘language’ for communication about very serious spiritual realities, and helps us have some distance from intensely personal issues. It began as a […]
Spiritual friendship begins with unity, and unity begins at the Cross of Christ. We need help learning how to approach and enter into dialogue with people of other faiths, lesser faith, or no faith, without denying our own beliefs. St. Pope John Paul believed this kind of communication is the key to evangelization in our […]
For the National League of American Pen Women, I got to tell the surprising story of my book, Souls at Rest – the inside scoop for fellow writers and artists. People understandably think I’m a bit crazy for self-publishing the first edition of SAR instead of going the more conventional Real Publisher route. (It is […]
Do You Suffer from PERS?!?!? In a recent talk – Home Schooling to Rock the World – I mentioned some symptoms that a person may be suffering from ‘post-Enlightenment reduction syndrome,’ (PERS) or ‘flattening’. This is the atrophy of one’s analogic sense – a reduction in the metaphoric dimension of human being. The problem is […]
FREE Parent Education Opportunity for Homeschoolers!! I’m getting ready for the 2017 Conference: Homeschooling to Rock the World and The Intellectual Life. This offer I made for you last year still stands! I am available to give FREE Parent Education presentations for small groups. Get the pdf here. Related
Catholic Artists Conference in Omaha Here’s the abstract from the talk I was scheduled to give (sadly, the conference was cancelled). Related
Berlinghieri’s St. Francis appears behind the altar of San Francesco in Pescia, Italy. It is an excellent example of art ordered to divine worship. Related
Purgatory – you’re in Heaven’s ante-chamber and there’s work to be done. But you can’t do it. The days of your power to act in your own behalf, to cultivate the self, are over. You’re here to be acted upon, to be purified, to be loved. As C.S. Lewis has pointed out, the “weight of […]
For Groundhog Day, I imagine Catholic bloggers everywhere are weighing in about the movie by that name. It’s so Catholic! How can we resist? I love this movie, Related
What actually is a ‘living book,’ and what makes them live? Living books are vital, interest-catching, windows into worlds. You can hear the author’s passion and his voice. For the Kansas Catholic Homeschooling Conference, I dug deeper into Charlotte Mason’s idea that living books are essential to authentic education. We found some surprising new ways […]
Poetic Reading is not just reading poetry! Poetic Reading cultivates the wholeness of the reader, because it engages her whole being. Instead of a (sometimes disconnected) verbal intellect operating on words (a narrow slice of our interior capacity), it is an integrated sensory-intellectual-affective person focused to receive experience and tuned to resonate with it! I […]
