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Serving Catholics for 25 Years
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This week we publish an original piece: Band of Brothers in Christ: The Abiding Value of Men's Groups by Laura Loker. Just as Leila Marie Lawler argues that we must recover "the collective memory," we must recover what it means to be a man.
Men's groups are one such place where men can learn how "to become better husbands, better fathers, better grandfathers, better men in society."
These gathering spaces are increasingly necessary, not just for an education in manliness, but because men need the opportunity to form true friendships. "In the U.S., men are getting lonelier. In 1990, 3% of men in a Survey Center on American Life poll reported having no close friends. In 2021, that number had risen to 15%."
It's not just men who will benefit from this character work. "Quite a few women, wives of the men, have thanked me for running the program because it changed their husbands in the way that they treat their wives and the way they treat their families," said George Knapp, who founded a very successful men's group at his parish in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Read the full article here. And perhaps you'll be inspired to start a similar group at your own parish, or know someone who would.
God bless you all this week! - Meaghen Gonzalez
Image: St. John of Capistrano, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see." - C.S. Lewis
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| The Lord of Substance |
| Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing |
| How precisely might someone go about showing that he had authority, mastery, and power over substances? Bear with me: this is an important question. |
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| A Husband's Self-Examination and Jane Austen's Mr. Bennet |
| John Cuddeback, LifeCraft |
| Seeing our own weakness exemplified in someone else, including and perhaps especially in artistic representation, can be a great opportunity for us—if we recognize ourselves, and also see the weakness for what it is. |
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| Symptoms of the Synod 2023 II |
| The Catholic Thing |
| The premise of our "Symptoms of the Synod" chronicle is that no one knows what "synodality" means, so the best approach is to simply observe the symptoms of the synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church. Only then can an attempt be made to diagnose what the underlying phenomenon really is. |
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| 1968 Is So Over |
| First Things |
| In 1883, speaking not as a novelist but as a bystander describing a terrible scene of carnage, Leo Tolstoy observed of what he documented: "We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and we cannot believe that if we do not look, there will not be what we do not wish to see." |
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| Homophobia & Homo Sapiens |
| The Catholic Thing |
| Despite all the talk about the Holy Spirit at the Synod on Synodality, an objective observer would have to say that the tongues of fire that produced John's Gospel, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and Revelations seem to be at a loss for words as the event grinds on. |
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| Flowers Enhance Our Humanity |
| NC Register |
| BOOK PICK: 'Arranging the Seasons' is the fourth installment of this popular series from Theology of Home. |
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