A few weeks ago, my nuclear family of six watched Yours, Mine and Ours, the delightful 1968 family comedy about a nuclear family of 20. In the film, Lucille Ball plays Helen North. Helen is a nurse, and a widow with eight children. Early in the film, she falls for Frank Beardsley, played by Henry Fonda. Frank is a naval officer, and a widower with 10 children. The two get married, and soon thereafter Helen is expecting. Unlike some old... Read more

For the politically homeless among us who continue to hope against hope that one of the nation’s two major political parties might yet grasp for sanity amidst the anti-American, dystopian ideologies of today’s unreasonable Republicans and unreasonable Democrats, respectively, a former marine in his late thirties—who grew up in Appalachia, served his country, attended Yale law school, and converted to the Catholicism that came to these shores only with immigrants—might once have seemed an appealing prospect for the vice presidency... Read more

I recently wrote for Law and Liberty as part of a forum about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which reaches its 75th anniversary this year. My essay argued that this seminal work, which has had such a foundational and negative impact on modern feminism, is both intellectually weak and morally repugnant. But, in my criticism of Beauvoir and my establishment of myself to her “right” in reference to motherhood in particular (Beauvoir is repulsed by maternity, full stop) I... Read more

From 2012 to 2017, I watched Lena Dunham’s Girls as it aired on HBO. In the show, which was about four female 20-somethings with a host of mental, emotional, and interpersonal issues trying to make it in Brooklyn, Dunham played Hannah Horvath, a fledgling writer who was supposed to have graduated from college in 2010 (the year after I did). The show opens with Horvath, who is an only child from Michigan, being financially cut off by her parents and then continues... Read more

As I perused Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy—which argues that American kids are over-diagnosed with mental health ailments, overtherapized, and underdisciplined (and is a must-read for everyone, especially parents)—I learned that among the reasons why Gen Xers first became enamored with psychotherapy was their admiration for the award-winning 1997 film, Good Will Hunting. This movie, for which I share great admiration, stars Matt Damon as 20-year-old Will Hunting, a mathematical genius from South Boston who was orphaned and abused... Read more

The recently concluded synod on synodality could have gone in a lot of different directions—a nothingburger, a schism, or anything in between. To this Catholic at least, the possibility that the synodal process would end in a substantive report that is not symbolically beholden to the politics of the moment—liberal or conservative—seemed like too much to hope for. Political Ideology The modern Church in the West, like Western society more generally, seems ever more polarized along lines that have less... Read more

Recently, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, whose Word on Fire ministry has made him one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent online voices, has been arguing in various venues that the “dumbing down” of Catholicism has stymied rather than enhanced the Church’s efforts at evangelization in the modern West. The dumbed down Catholicism on offer today in many Catholic parishes and even more Catholic schools and universities, as defined by Barron, emphasizes social justice as divorced from the rest of... Read more

I am a mom to three boys. My oldest two attend what is by today’s standards a fairly traditional parochial school; the youngest is not yet school age. For a boy, my oldest son is by nature somewhere above average in conscientiousness and exceedingly high in agreeableness (like his father). His little brother is by nature less than average in agreeableness but exceedingly high in conscientiousness (like me). The adult-pleasing orientation of my firstborn, the task-orientation of my second-born, and... Read more