As the freshness of childhood and the exuberance of youth fade, and life assumes a regularity and familiarity, it is all too easy to become jaded and blasé. Instead of ...

Some think that a chaotic home means you can't homeschool. John Clark disagrees, and encourages you to focus on establishing something more important first.

While everyone has heard of King Midas’s avarice and his desire for The Golden Touch that transforms everything he touches into gold, not everyone has heard of The Leaden Touch. In Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book one of the children who hears of the famous story about King Midas, remarks, “But some people have what we may call ‘The Leaden Touch,’ and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.”

Catholic parents seeks to shelter their children in their youth, so that they may grow in wisdom and holiness without constant battering from the world. But once they are grown and educated, these children no longer need shelter. They are able to take what they have learned and engage the world without fear.

Every human being experiences the conflict between duty and pleasure, what a person wishes to do for enjoyment and what a person ought to do by way of obligation. These two tendencies often appear as contrary, irreconcilable powers that inevitably clash and produce resentment or frustration.

Two great ancient philosophers, Marcus Aurelius in Meditations and Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy — two works renowned for their great wisdom and moral power — teach the importance of the virtue of self-possession. Both writers observe that no persons can control the outside events that surround them.

Clichés tend to become clichés for their accuracy. “Life goes too fast” is one. A few weeks ago, a longtime family friend of ours visited us with her nine-month-old daughter.

When a person complains, his creative abilities break free. But it’s also proof to me that we fallen humans don’t commend people well; we don’t thank them enough; and we pat each other on the back far too little.

Longinus looked around and saw some rather unsettling sights: a tremendous storm arose, the earth trembled, the dead rose from their graves. The point is that Longinus SAW these things. You see, Longinus was all but blind, being afflicted with severe opthalmia.

Disappointment, rejection, and defeat, however, do not mean incompetence, weakness, or failure. When a person shakes off the dust, he leaves because of the stiff-necked and hardhearted unwillingness of the many that lack docility and openness to the truth the messenger brings.

There has been a lot of worry lately among homeschooling parents regarding the “common core” curriculum. Judging by the amount of views by readers of this journal, it is the biggest issue of the day. But the problem is not so much in merely having a common core—it is in what that common core consists. Some cores are good and some are rotten.

This analytical essay has been available as a help to those 11th grade students, serving both as introduction and beginner’s analysis.. Chesterton’s epic is certainly his greatest poetic work...

During the past several months, Pope Francis has insisted that priests and religious should go into the streets and do some heavy lifting in evangelization. Workers in the Lord’s vineyard cannot allow themselves to become complacent, but should seek out difficult tasks in the real world.

In the folk tale, five brothers all choose their profession and perform their work with success and prosperity: a brick maker, a mason, an architect, an innovator, and a critic. However, only the oldest brother unites vocation and avocation, and only his work has effects for the future and for heaven.

In the story the merchant’s son who wasted his money finds himself in desperate circumstances until a friend gives him a magical flying trunk. When he flies with it and descends from the sky, he introduces himself as a Turkish god who has come from above to marry the king’s daughter. Honored with this privilege, the king gladly agrees to the marriage: “Yes, you shall certainly marry our daughter.”

After you finish the last page, there are books that you forget about right away. But then there are those rare ones that remain with you forever. Cynthia Montanaro’s Diary of a Country Mother is one of those. This book is a biography of her mentally-challenged son, Timothy, whose life was cut short in an accident as a teenager. Montanaro, a homeschooling veteran, says that she wrote it as a celebration of Tim’s life, but most of all as a “thanksgiving journal to God.”

To be human is to be born with desires, to have wishes, and to experience longings. But not all wishes have the same quality, nature, or origin. Some wishes assume the shape of daydreams or fantasies as utopian visions enter the mind and people imagine impossibilities.

She determined that she would run off and live an ascetic life as a consecrated religious. Her problem was that her father (by the name of Paphnutius) had the necessary resources to find and reclaim her if she simply retired to a woman’s monastery.

First, stop insisting that you “went wrong” with your kids. I don’t know exactly how Jesus felt when He was betrayed by Judas. But I do know this: I know that Jesus did not wonder where He went wrong with Judas. Jesus didn’t “go wrong.”

Man by nature is idealistic, seeks excellence, and hopes for perfection, but he is bound by the weakness of human nature and the limits of the human condition. There is no such being as a faultless painter or a sinless human being. In the sport of baseball every player aspires to get a hit every time and bat 1.000, but even the best of batters only have an average of .300.