Simone Weil, a noted Jewish philosopher, remarked, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, ...

Philomena (10) and Dominica (8) recently began playing in a girls’ softball league. Before one of their games, I took a bucket of balls and began to pitch to them ...

In times of difficulty, people often turn to art to inspire them. For instance, on the wall of my office, I have a painting called The Triumph of the Innocents. ...

In A Wonder Book and The Tanglewood Tales Hawthorne retells some of the famous classical myths in an imaginative and charming style that captures the universality and moral wisdom of ...

One of the greatest of Catholic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., is best known for his appreciation of the beauty, variety, and individuality (“this-ness”) of God’s creation. As a poet ...

In ancient times, the Egyptians, lacking an advanced alphabet, used a combination of pictures to express their ideas. That might amuse us in this day and age, but it seems ...

“It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.”—Robert Frost, “At Woodward’s Gardens” In Frost’s poem, “At Woodward’s Gardens,” a boy visiting a zoo carries a magnifying glass. From his ...

Sancho Panza, the comical squire of the illustrious Don Quixote who vowed to restore knight-errantry into a debased world and recover the Golden Age, once told his master, “An ass ...

My children and I were recently speaking about when and how I first began home schooling. The textbook answer is that I started home schooling in the sixth grade, but ...

“It is not enough that your actions are good. You must take care that they appear so.” In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, the wise Squire Allworthy offers this advice ...

Moms instinctively know how to help their children. It has been said that no thermometer is as accurate as a mother’s hand. There is a lot of truth to that saying.

One of the most famous statements of wisdom comes from Dr. Johnson, the eminent man of letters of the eighteenth century England who wrote Dictionary of the English Language, Lives ...

As I have written in prior articles, my thirteen-year-old son Demetrius has long had aspirations to be a marine biologist. And as a parent who seeks to encourage his children ...

These articles will cite famous advice, wise proverbs, and prudent counsel as they appear in the classics of literature, in the words of famous characters from the good and great ...

A basketball coach had a meeting with a player who was not performing well and asked him, “What is the problem with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?” The player ...

With Ash Wednesday fast approaching, many home schooling families are revisiting their annual question: “What should we give up for Lent?” While there are many worthwhile answers to the question, ...

When we were first married, Lisa and I made a pact to go out on a date at least once a week. And, more or less, we’ve been faithful to ...

As I write this article, I will turn forty years old in ten days. You would think with four decades of life on this earth under my belt that I’d ...

Occasionally, when people ask me about this column, they wonder if I’m making this stuff up. So I thought I would take a few moments and answer the more frequent ...

It often occurs that as a man gets older, he looks back on his life and worries about the sins of his past. As we grow spiritually closer to Jesus, ...