The Catholic Man Show

Eleven years now the monks of Clear Creek have let a field full of Catholic men camp on their land, and Adam opened the show by thanking Fr. Francis Bethel for the charity it takes to put up with them. Father said they don't bother the monks at all. They do their best to keep it that way. Adam admitted he feels something every time he drives onto the property, and Father said that's what people tell him all the time: they come through the front gate and feel peace. For the monks, that's not an experience. That's just Tuesday. This one was recorded live at Eagle's Landing in front of a camp audience, with a chess game going a few feet away and a sudden downpour hammering the tent halfway through. Father didn't flinch.
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Father's new book is From Silence to Silence: A Benedictine Pilgrimage to God's Sanctuary (TAN Books), and he built it like a journey. He wishes it had drawings. The first one would be a man whittling a staff, which is the equipment chapter: faith, hope, charity, the faculties God already put in you. Then the man walks into a rough, dark woods with no path. That's where the ascetical work happens: exterior silence, ordering the passions and the imagination, learning to use words for God. Then a path appears and you can see a church glimmering in the distance, and the meditation begins on God's transcendence, his beauty, his love. Then you find the sanctuary sits on top of a cliff you can't climb, and God has to lift you the rest of the way. The last part is a man at the window, looking in. Father ends the book with St. Augustine, who finished On the Trinity as an old man after starting it young, longing to enter the silence where we'll all say one word together.
The distinction that runs through the whole conversation is that silence isn't the same thing as the absence of noise. The absence of noise is neutral. The silence Father is after is rich, full, ordered. It's St. Francis up all night repeating "My God and my all," a handful of words carrying his whole life. It's Aquinas laying down his pen and calling the Summa straw. You only get there after a lot of meditating on God, and then all of it gathers into one loving gaze.
Why does it matter? Because without it you get torn in every direction by your emotions and the images coming at you all day. Father quoted a priest friend who preached a retreat at Clear Creek: God wants you to do what you're doing, and the devil wants you to do everything but what you're doing. He quoted St. Bernard too. If you want to clean the inside, shut the windows and keep the dust out.
Then the practical part. Father walked through the monastic day, from the Great Silence after Compline to the only real social time, which is recreation after lunch. One of the guys described the version he runs at home: quiet until eight every morning, a minute of silent prayer for every year of your age, then chores in silence. Father's advice on how much time to give: John Senior used to say tithe it, a tenth of your day, plus a day of retreat a month and a few days a year. And his favorite line of the night came from the old monks at Fontgombault who'd lived through World War II. It's very hard to pray during a bombardment, they were told. They answered that it's quite easy to pray during a bombardment if you're actually being bombed.
Stick around for the podcast tail, where Father tells the story of John Senior telling an EWTN audience to smash their televisions, and the old man who never stopped wishing he'd been a cowboy.
Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Eleven years of the TCMS Camp Out on the grounds of Clear Creek Abbey
Why people say they feel peace the moment they come through the front gate
Pax and Ora et Labora as the "unofficial" Benedictine mottos
How TAN Books came to Fr. Bethel asking for a Benedictine voice, and his one-word answer when they proposed silence
His first visit to Fontgombault, arriving just in time for Vespers, and the presence he felt as the monks came in to a single bell
The book's four-part pilgrimage: the staff, the dark woods, the cliff, and the window into the sanctuary
Why the spiritual life starts with looking at God, not with self-purification
Exterior silence, ordered passions, and the silence of words
Meditating on God's transcendence and beauty as a path toward his silence
Why there's always a silence beyond our true ideas about God
Aquinas calling the Summa straw, and St. Francis repeating "My God and my all" through the night
How a monk writes a book an hour at a time, and why gluing old talks together didn't work
Whether a man can grow spiritually without silence at all
Spiritual conversion and moral conversion as the two sides of the interior life
"God wants you to do what you're doing, the devil wants you to do everything but what you're doing"
Photography, images, and how recent the problem of pornography really is
Why so many people are afraid of silence and fill their lives with noise
Silence versus the absence of noise, and why the second one is neutral
St. Bernard on shutting the windows to keep out the dust
Teaching that flows from interior silence, and why John Senior is the example that comes to mind
Why God's language is silence: the one Word the Father speaks, in St. John of the Cross
Why God doesn't just send you an email with his will for your life
Custody of the senses at work, and St. John of the Cross on the images you weren't looking for
The vice of curiosity, the internet, the news cycle, and a phone that distracts you even when it's off
Whether the monks order from Amazon
The monastic Great Silence, from Compline to Prime, and the rhythm of a monk's day
Why monks don't talk in the church or in the halls outside the cells
Bringing the Great Silence home: quiet until eight, a minute of prayer per year of age, chores in silence
How much time a husband and father owes God: John Senior's tithe of the day
A day of retreat a month, a few days a year, and Ember Days at Clear Creek
Praying during a bombardment, according to the monks who survived one
Whether silence can become utilitarian, and why it's about a relationship, not nirvana
Silence, patience, and how growing in one virtue grows the others
Ejaculatory prayers, and nourishing silence with a few words from time to time
Will heaven be silent or full of singing? Both at once
John Senior, Fr. Fessio, EWTN, and "smash your TVs"
John Senior running away at 13 to be a cowboy, and still wishing it at 75
Wonder and silence in John Senior and Dennis Quinn
Who the book was written for: lay beginners, with a hope that a lot of nuns read it too

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Guest:
Fr. Francis Bethel, OSB, monk and subprior of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, professed in 1977 and ordained in 1983, one of the founding monks who came from Fontgombault, and a teacher of dogmatic theology at the abbey

Fr. Bethel's books:
From Silence to Silence: A Benedictine Pilgrimage to God's Sanctuary (TAN Books, 2025). Available from the Clear Creek gift shop
John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, his earlier book, which he said took about ten years

Places:
Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, Hulbert, Oklahoma
Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault, France, the motherhouse of Clear Creek
Eagle's Landing, the Camp Out site at Clear Creek

Saints and spiritual writers:
St. Augustine, On the Trinity (De Trinitate), and its closing prayer about saying "one thing" together in God. Augustine's own line about the work, that he began it as a young man and published it as an old man, comes from his prefatory letter to Bishop Aurelius
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologiae, and calling his work straw near the end of his life
St. Francis of Assisi, "My God and my all"
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on shutting the windows to keep out the dust (paraphrased on air)
St. John of the Cross, on the one Word the Father speaks in eternal silence
St. Ephrem the Syrian, quoted on air on speech as silver and silence as gold (attribution as given on air; the saying is best known as a proverb)
St. Paul, praying that we have a sense of God's will
St. Teresa, on her calm and getting things done quickly (the saint was not clearly named on air)
Dom Paul Delatte, Benedictine abbot of Solesmes, and his Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, read in the monastery
The old monks of Fontgombault who lived through World War II

Teachers and authors:
John Senior, the Integrated Humanities Program, and his influence on the founding of Clear...

Fr. Bonaventure Chapman came back to Tulsa, and the night before this recording he stood in front of a room of men and talked about prayer. Adam woke up the next morning, remembered what Father said, actually did it, and reported back that it helped. At least on that one day. Father took the win: one day works, that's great. The line that stuck was the smallest one in the whole talk. Do a little, habitually. When his spiritual directees hand him a Lenten list, he almost never crosses anything off, because each thing on the list is usually good. He just ratchets the quantity down so they don't run straight into failure. Thirty minutes of silent prayer a day sounds holy when you're writing it down. Lent is long. Start with five, and know that five minutes a day for a year is a lot of time.
Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, everybody they asked gave them the same name. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether you're leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and see what they already have ready for you.
The full talk on the prayer life is going to patrons, so if you want it, patreon.com/thecatholicmanshow. Everything that comes in goes back into the show. It is not yet feeding anybody's children. They haven't reached those levels of despair.
Father's definition of prayer is the setup for the whole episode. Prayer is wasting time with God, because he's worth wasting time with. He learned to say it that way as a chaplain at Providence College, where the Dominicans each took a Division I team and he got women's basketball. He told them up front he wasn't their coach and wasn't there to fix anything. He was there to waste time on them, which is how you tell somebody they're worth something valuable to you. That's what he takes prayer to be. You're not the producing agent. You showed up, you set the time apart, and even if you never touch contemplation that morning, you did the thing you were there to do.
Same logic runs through beauty. Adam still remembers standing in front of Michelangelo's David in Italy and getting hit by it harder than he expected, and he doesn't consider himself an art guy. Father used to teach philosophy of art out of Richard Wollheim's Painting as an Art, where Wollheim describes needing roughly 45 minutes in front of a single painting just to clear his head enough to see it. So Father assigned it. Thirty to forty minutes, one painting, write down what happens. He did it himself in front of a Twachtman winter scene at the National Gallery, wearing the habit, people staring. Thirty minutes in, the painting changed. The cold went warm and a house appeared that he had not been able to see. Art works on you the way truth and goodness work on you. You don't take it apart, you let it tell you something.
Then the topic: ethics as praxis, not poesis. Why doing good is not like making a cake.
Aristotle splits practical reason in two. Praxis is doing, and its target is the doer. Poesis is making, and its target is the thing made, the finished product sitting on the counter. We almost always think about the moral life in the second category, which is why we judge ourselves by outcomes. But nobody talks like that about actual making. If a man says he's a great cake maker and every cake he produces is garbage, that doesn't compute. The goodness of a maker is settled by the product. You're not allowed to say "I'm a good carpenter, the house just always falls down." Father's point is that a man can be a lousy cake maker, a lousy air traffic controller, a lousy software developer, and still be a good man. Mother Teresa was not, as far as anybody knows, a baker.
So what makes a man good is what he does, not what he produces. Ethics comes from character, and character is habit. Virtue is the power to do the thing you're for. The knife is a good knife because it's sharp and heavy, and it's a good knife sitting in the drawer, not only while it's cutting. Honesty works the same way. You build the habit so that when somebody asks you a question you don't have to run the math. You just tell the truth and then deal with whatever comes.
Dave pushed back on the ends and the means, and Father's answer is the hinge of the episode. Of course the ends don't justify the means, if by "end" you mean the external result. But the real end of the moral life is you. The good man is the end. Which means the end does justify the means, because the means are you, acting. There's almost no space between them in a person. A bad act always produces a bad result inside the man who does it, no matter how well the situation turns out.
Adam raised the obvious objection: doesn't that collapse into egotism, where I'm just farming my own soul and calling it virtue? Father's answer is that acting is outward by nature. You don't tell the truth in a vacuum, you tell it to a person in a situation. You don't forgive in the abstract, you forgive somebody who may well take advantage of you afterward. The act reaches out even though the character it forms is yours. And for Aristotle the common good sits above the individual anyway. For us it's better still, because the highest good is a person you can actually be friends with, which Aristotle had no room for. He couldn't make sense of relating ethically to a god at all. Show him the Annunciation and he'd say Mary owes that being nothing, because you don't share a nature with it.
Then the hard question. Where does the standard come from? Aristotle says virtue is a mean determined by reason as the prudent man would determine it, which sounds like a circle, and Father grants that it is one. Aristotle was an empiricist. He found out what a good knife was by handling knives, and he found out what a good man was by watching good men. The trouble is we might pick wrong and end up admiring power. St. Francis of Assisi would not have impressed Aristotle for one minute. Too humble, not magnanimous enough, not getting anything done. But we were handed the answer key. The saints are our moral exemplars, which is why Benedict XVI treated them as the living interpretation of the Gospel, and why Paul could say imitate me as I imitate Christ.
The takeaway is practical, in the real sense of that word. When you're stuck, don't ask what result you can engineer. Ask what a good man does here. Socrates settled it in the Crito: we would rather suffer injustice than do it, because suffering is something that happens to you and doing is something that is you. Father uses the same test in the confessional. Was this a happening or a doing? Were you engaged in it, or did it land on you? Most of us don't sin out of malice. We sin out of weakness, backed into a corner where one small wrong thing looks like it solves the bigger problem. That's making, not doing. Your job was never to manufacture the good outcome. Your job was to be good.
Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Fr. Bonaventure's talk to Tulsa men on the prayer life, and the full recording going to patrons
Why he cuts the quantity, not the items, when spiritual directees hand him a Lenten list
Starting at five minutes of mental prayer instead of thirty, and why "Jesus did it, I can do it" is not a plan
Setting the time apart as the thing you actually owe, whether or not the prayer "produced" anything
Prayer as wasting time with God, because he's worth wasting time with
Chaplain to Providence College women's basketball, and telling a team you're there to waste time on them
Standing in front of Michelangelo's David and getting hit harder than you expected
Richard Wollheim's 45 minutes in front of one painting, and the assignment Father gave his students
The Twachtman winter scene that changed at the 30 minute mark, and the house that appeared in it
Why art has to work on you, the way truth and goodness do, instead of being taken apart
Ethics as character, not as a list of oughts handed down from outside
Aristotle in the lagoon: the naturalist who studied octopuses and asked what makes a thing a good one
What makes a knife a good knife, and why virtue means power
Praxis and poesis: doing aims at the doer, making aims at the thing made
"I'm a good cake maker, I just can't make good cakes," and why that doesn't compute
Mother Teresa was probably not a baker, an air traffic controller, or a software developer
Why judging the moral life by results quietly turns you into a product manager of your own soul
The ends don't justify the means, except that the end is you, so in a sense they do
Why a bad act always produces a bad result inside the man doing it
Habits as the content of character, and telling the truth without running the math first
Is this egotism? Why acting is outward facing even when the character formed is yours
Aristotle's problem with the Annunciation, and why he couldn't be friends with a god
Kant versus Aristotle on what you owe a rational being that shows up in your room
Virtue as a mean determined as the prudent man determines it, and whether that's a circle
Aristotle the empiricist: finding the standard by watching people who actually live well
Why St. Francis of Assisi would not have impressed Aristotle
The saints as the answer key, and Paul saying imitate me as I imitate Christ
Plato is great on triangles and terrible on toads
Why you've never seen a real triangle,...

Adam opened by asking Fr. Bonaventure Chapman to explain his love of toads, and Father asked back whether this was going to be the essay version. It was. It started with Hopper, a good-looking male toad caught on Mother's Day when Father was a kid, the first real pet in the house. You can tell a male toad by the forearms, which he needs for holding on. But a pet is a deposit, and theology is what you do with a deposit. Every animal exists because it is supposed to, and each one reflects some attribute of God, because God is infinite and nothing finite can carry all of Him at once. So the attributes get spread out. Power goes to the lion. Strength to the ox. Purity to the swan, penetrating sight to the eagle. Mosquitoes remain an open question Father intends to raise personally when he gets up there. Toads carry the hard one: aseity. They look like rocks, but they are alive. You nudge one and it does not flee, does not panic, does not perform. It looks back at you with a plain so what. It is not depending on you. It is fine without you. That is what God is like.
Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, every person they asked gave them the same name. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether you are leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and look at what they have ready for you.
David countered with the platypus, which he and his buddy Thomas Lackey have decided is the noblest of animals and has to be either the first thing God made or the last. First, because He had been looking forward to creation for all eternity, led with His best material, then realized He had better slow down and give everything after that one good idea apiece. Or last, because He had already made everything else and thought, what if mammal, but with venom in the heels, and it lays eggs, and it has a bill. Then He stopped out of mercy. Michael filed a friendly amendment on behalf of the finite intelligences. Australia went on record as the test lab.
Then the topic, and it is a big one. Father's case is that St. Faustina Kowalska should be named a Doctor of the Church, and that the Year of Mercy was the obvious moment to do it. A doctor is not honored for her own sake any more than a saint is canonized for his. Both are given to us, pro nobis. A doctor is someone whose vantage point lights up an aspect of the faith the rest of us were walking past. Augustine gets grace. Bernard of Clairvaux gets the mellifluous tongue. Bonaventure gets the seraphic love. It is not competition, it is refraction, one pure white light through a prism, and the doctors are how we see the colors.
Faustina has a doctrine, and the doctrine is mercy. Her work is the Diary, which is not a treatise but a record of a woman talking to Jesus and writing down both halves of it. That is the part Father loves. You are not reading a transcript of revelation, you are in the church balcony listening to a saint pray, and she tells you what she thought about what He said, how the sisters reacted, what she wanted to do next. Bible and the Diary is his desert island list.
Here is the objection, and Father takes it seriously because Thomas takes it seriously. Mercy cannot be the greatest attribute of God simply speaking. Mercy is pity toward a sufferer and a desire to heal it, which means it depends on somebody suffering. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit do not need mercy from one another. God's greatest attributes have to be the ones He has with nothing else but Himself: intellect, will, love. Deus caritas est. Thomas allows that mercy is greatest secundum quid, for us, because our condition means mercy is the shape His love takes when it reaches us. So when Jesus tells Faustina to proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God, you can start to wonder whether the Diary is reliable.
It is a translation problem, and it is the best thing in this episode. Jesus is speaking Polish to a poor, uneducated Polish girl, and Polish does something no other language does here. In Latin, mercy is misericordia, from miser, wretchedness, plus cor, heart. Pity of the heart. English, German, and the rest all run mercy and love back to separate roots. Polish does not. Miłosierdzie sounds exactly like misericordia, but its root is not misery. It is miłość. Love. So the word is not pity of the heart, it is love of the heart. The deeper love. When Christ tells her to proclaim mercy as His greatest attribute, He is telling her to proclaim the deepest love.
And she already showed you this, back at Diary 180, where she writes that the third attribute is love and mercy, miłość i miłosierdzie, and the verb is singular. Not two things. One. By the time you get to 301 the shorthand is already established.
Which is why it matters. We treat mercy as a second act of the will. I am supposed to love you, and then if you wrong me I have a separate question to answer about whether to be merciful. Two decisions. For God there is only one. He does not love us into being, watch us sin, and then convene a divine moment to decide whether to bother. Mercy is His steadfast love refusing to stop. You love someone, they walk away from you, and you keep going toward them. You just have to go farther. That is not a different love, it is the same love gone deeper, which is what the sierdzie is doing in the word. It is not a lifeguard deciding whether to blow the whistle or go in the water. Going in is who He is.
Run that lens over everything else and it starts opening doors, which is Father's actual pitch for what he calls Faustinianism, a school of thought alongside Augustinianism and Thomism. It makes sense of the hard line in the Diary about the greater sinner having the greater right to His mercy. More love for the ones who need more love. That is not scandalous, it is arithmetic.
On the podcast, which you should go subscribe to, the guys keep Father for the harder questions. Whether God loves anyone without mercy. Whether Mary is the exception, and why the Immaculate Conception turns out to be an act of mercy too. Whether God loves some people more than others, and what a glass with holes in it is doing under a waterfall. Plus how to actually read the Diary, which is one page a day for about two years, and why Father carries a holy card with her relic in it that Fr. Gregory Pine handed him right when he needed it.
Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Why Fr. Bonaventure loves toads, starting with Hopper, caught on Mother's Day
How to tell a male toad from a female toad, and why the forearms matter
Theological biology: every animal reflects some attribute of God because nothing finite can carry all of Him
Lions for power, oxen for strength, swans for purity, eagles for penetrating sight
The outstanding question of mosquitoes, to be raised in person
Why the toad is the best living image of God's aseity and impassibility
The toad's "so what," and a God who is perfectly happy whether or not you show up
The platypus as the noblest of animals, and whether it was God's first idea or His last
Australia as the containment lab, and Michael's friendly amendment on behalf of the angels
Crusius on why there can be no loveless world, and why God could not have made a universe of only toads
Why non-loving things have no interesting relation to God, and loving things do
The case that St. Faustina Kowalska should be named a Doctor of the Church
Why the Year of Mercy was the obvious moment and it did not happen
What a Doctor of the Church actually is, and why doctors and saints are both given pro nobis
The prism image: one pure white light, and the doctors are how we see the colors
Why the Diary is unlike other spiritual classics, and what it means to eavesdrop on a saint at prayer
Bible and the Diary as the desert island list
The early pushback on Faustina, the mistranslations, and why the Church is rightly slow with private revelation
Aquinas condemned in 1270 and 1277, and why being disliked is not a mark against you
Lord Falkland's rule: where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change
Thomas's objection: mercy depends on a sufferer, so it cannot be God's greatest attribute simply speaking
Why the Trinity has no need of mercy, and why intellect, will, and love are the attributes up for grabs
Mercy as greatest secundum quid, the shape God's love takes when it reaches sinners
The Incarnation as an act of mercy, which is love for the sinner
Why misericordia means pity of the heart and miłosierdzie does not
The Polish root: miłość is love, so mercy is love of the heart, not pity of the heart
Diary 180 and the singular verb, and why 301 is shorthand for something already said
Why we treat mercy as a second act of the will and God does not
Love that keeps going farther when the person walks away
Why this is not the lifeguard deciding whether to blow the whistle
Faustinianism as a school of thought alongside Augustinianism and Thomism
"The greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to My mercy," and why that stops being scandalous
The Balthasar translation problem: dürfen is "may we hope," not "dare we hope"
Polish as a vowel desert, and the despair of a 7 a.m. Mass in Polish
What...

Dave came to Adam's house to record and brought a host, a co-host, a topic, and a bottle of whiskey. No laptop. No microphones. No headphones. No headphone amp. Second time he has pulled that off. In his defense, he already hauled a computer over there for a permanent setup so he would not have to schlep gear across town every week, and in Adam's defense, that computer is still sitting there unplugged. So they went home, came back the next night, and recorded anyway. Second night in a row. For such a time as this.
Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, every person they asked gave them the same name. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether you are leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and look at what they have ready for you.
First, the Wiffle Ball tournament. There is a tradition in the Catholic Tulsa community on Labor Day, admittedly a niche corner of it, where the Hanisch family turns their entire backyard into a real Wiffle Ball field. Scoreboard. Foul poles. Pitching mound. Dirt. Bases. Bleachers. Concession stand. Instant replay. A bubble machine that fires when somebody goes deep. Eight teams, double elimination. Adam and Dave play with Adam's brother-in-law Holden, Mark Gabriel, and Brandon Bargus under the name Wiffle While You Work. Roughly ten years of this, and they had never won it. This year they made the championship game and lost by a run, 6 to 5. Ten years ago the wives played and it was a hang. Now teams recruit former ballplayers, one of whom had a family thing come up, which Adam called lucky out loud. Shout out to Chris and Carrie Hanisch, who carry the whole ordeal, and to Mark Gabriel, who sponsored it this year. This is what it looks like when a family says we have something to offer and then offers it, every year, on purpose.
Which got Dave onto something he has been chewing on since they were all at Brandon Sheard's place for a rock put. Heaviest rock, longest throw, get the men in a line. Everybody looked at the guy who was obviously going to win, and he won, and it did not matter. The women and kids watched the men compete, and Dave watched what it did to the community. So here is the idea: whenever your friends gather, have a men's competition. Every time. Croquet, a heavy rock, flipping a quarter closest to a line, it does not matter what it is. What matters is that it is only for men, because the boys need to see it. A boy needs to look at that line and understand that he is a boy and those are men, and then he needs to be summoned across. Not by his own father. By another man in the community who calls him up and gives him the right to stand and compete. That is a rite of passage, and American culture has almost none left. It is also cheap, easy, and a lot more fun than standing around. There were zero women in the Wiffle Ball tournament this year, and there were young boys playing next to the men, faster than the men, and considerably less sore the next day.
The campout is in a couple of weeks, last weekend of September like always, and it is more than full. Brandon Sheard will be there. Tomas from Ultimo Cigar will be there. Get away, pray with the monks, see all the men. If you missed it, put next year on the calendar now.
The pour is Octomore 16.2 from Bruichladdich, a super peated Islay scotch aged five years in wine and sherry casks at 58.1 percent. A 2025 limited release. If you like peat, start with Laphroaig, Lagavulin, and Ardbeg, then understand that Octomore was the first distillery to put out something genuinely insane on the peat scale. Others have since gone higher in parts per million, and most of those were gimmicks that came and went. Dave's honest rule on expensive bottles is that a $200 bottle is almost never $100 better than a $100 bottle. Octomore was the first time he thought it actually was. A whiskey after his own heart.
Then the topic: the universal destination of goods, Catechism 2402, which sits under the Seventh Commandment. Thou shalt not steal. That placement tells you something. God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind, to care for it, master it by labor, and enjoy its fruits, and the goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. Not for you specifically. All of it, the oceans on planets nobody has found yet down to the bacteria underfoot, aimed at the good of mankind.
Adam gave the line the whole episode hangs on. The five acres you own are truly yours. But not merely yours.
So why private property at all? Aquinas gives three reasons, and they hold up. Industriousness, because a man tends his own garden harder than he tends the community garden, not from selfishness but because shared duty spreads thin and nobody owns the outcome. Order, because affairs run more smoothly when each man is responsible for a specific thing. And peace, because quarrels multiply when property is held in common without distinction. Buy a boat with four families and find out. Somebody leaves trash in it, somebody scrapes the hull, somebody drives it hard and it breaks down, and now you are all negotiating who pays. Adam gave the other side its due: shared ownership lowers the cost of entry, and if every man is limited to a suburban backyard there is simply no beef, because a cow needs more land than that. Four families together can afford ground that feeds all four. There is a place for each. Every community has to find the order.
The two ditches are individualism and collectivism, and this is the road between them. Private property is not a concession to greed. It flows out of what a family is. Sacred means set apart, and a family is set apart from the community by its nature, so it makes sense that a piece of creation gets set apart to match. A man needs somewhere he can say what is inside here is exclusive to my family, because the family itself is exclusive by nature. Raising your children on your own ground is not a detour from the good of mankind. It is how you serve it. Dave put it plainly: he is raising four daughters and three boys, and he needs the Minihan family raising strong holy young men, and Adam needs the same from him. Families are not sufficient to themselves. That is the debt.
All of which is stewardship. This is God's house and you are managing it, and the King is coming back to see how it was kept, and eventually He wants all of it back. Your children most of all. Their souls were handed to you to tend so that they flourish into who they were made to be, and the fruit of that gets shared with everybody.
St. John Chrysostom says surplus has to be counted as stolen goods when the wealthy ignore the destitute in front of them. Dave admitted the part that is actually hard. When he has extra eggs, he knows it instantly and gives them away gladly, no friction. Natural goods are easy to read. Man made goods are not. He cannot tell when he has a surplus of the things he bought, and he is worse at parting with them, even though they are of a lower order than food. He has too many T-shirts. He knows he has too many T-shirts. He pulls one out that has not been worn in fifteen years and hears himself say but what if. He is also fair about the old quotes on the unworn shoes in your closet belonging to the barefoot, which come from a world where a man owned one pair of shoes, not work boots and dress shoes and tennis shoes. Owning a few pairs is not theft. But if you can afford the next pair and cannot afford to give in proportion to your station, that is worth an honest look, because self love is pernicious and easy to feed.
Adam brought it back to the ground. Haylee was in Oklahoma City, he finally got the kids down, he was not feeling well, and he was in bed when he remembered the chickens were not up and the pigs had no water. He laid there a long time talking himself out of it. What he learned about himself is how easily he can do that, and how good the excuses sound. Six months ago these were the responsibilities he was praying for. Everybody does this. You want the promotion, you get the promotion, and then you resent the people and problems that came with it, when the problems were the thing you asked for. That is where virtue lives: doing the thing when nobody is watching and your appetites are voting against it. Protect what you were given. Provide for it. Establish your children so they can stand without you, because you do not want to be a helicopter dad when they are 28. And the man who buries his talent in the yard was not evil. He was just tired.
Francis de Sales, in Introduction to the Devout Life, lands it. A man may possess wealth. He must not let wealth possess his heart. Detachment is what keeps money a servant to the family first and then to the poor, in that order, because subsidiarity is real and you do not take food off your children's plates to be generous elsewhere. God does call men to wealth. The virtue of magnificence needs them. St. Peter's does not get built without them, and neither does your parish church. The question to keep asking is whether a thing gives you comfort or gives you happiness, because those are not the same and one of them will quietly own you.
Truly yours. Not merely yours. Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Showing up to record a podcast with a topic, a bottle of whiskey, and none of the recording equipment
The permanently installed computer that nobody has plugged in
The Labor Day Wiffle Ball tournament in the Catholic Tulsa community, and the Hanisch backyard field with foul poles, instant replay, and a bubble machine
Ten years of Wiffle While You Work, a...

Dave turned 40 this week, one day before they hit record, and he wants it understood that he has been looking forward to this. Thirty was a bummer. Forty is different. He expects his forties to be a decade of proficiency instead of a decade of learning how to do everything for the first time: better father, better disciplinarian, better coach, better husband, better at the farm. A decade of potency, he called it, which Adam immediately took in the least charitable direction available and turned into a bit about donating blood and testosterone at the same time. Before that, though, there was a real moment. Adam asked how his spiritual life was and Dave told the truth. He has been in a down recently, the kind where things you have always known to be sinful start to look not that bad, and the only thing that held the line was habit. Intellectual habit, built over years, doing exactly what habit is supposed to do when feeling has gone quiet. Then the piglets. Adam has been building a pig pen since last fall, thinking it through all winter, and Dave finally called to say his sow's litter was ready. Adam ran hot wire that morning, got everything set, and had the sense to put just one pig in first to see what would happen. The pig touched the hot wire, did not get shocked, backed up four steps, ran, and cleared the boards. Twenty seconds. It landed close enough that Adam caught it by a back leg. Welcome to the swine herd community.
Sponsor: Amen app (from the Augustine Institute) Free, no paywall, no subscription. It is how Adam and Dave get their kids ready to receive the Gospel before Mass even starts, plus free access to Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion to Mary. Download the Amen app.
Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, everyone they asked pointed to the same name: Select International Tours. Having used them, the guys can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether leading a pilgrimage or joining one, head to selectinternationaltours.com and see what they have ready for you.
The pour is Pabst Blue Ribbon, which won a blue ribbon at some point a long time ago and has been telling everyone about it ever since. Adam will defend it. Not as a great beer, but as a beer that belongs in the category of things you can hand a man who walks into your house without apologizing. Oklahoma has been over 100 degrees for something like seventy straight days, all of July and all of August, and on a day like that PBR is exactly right.
Then the main topic. Wendell Berry died August 31 at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at 92. Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, essayist, five generations on the same ground his family had worked since the early 1800s. He took degrees from the University of Kentucky, went off to the city to be a writer, got everything a young writer is supposed to want, and decided quickly that it was not what he wanted. So he went home. He farmed with horses long after he could afford a tractor. His writing cabin, 16 by 20 feet on stilts over the Kentucky River, had no electric light. He never owned a television or a computer and never sent an email in his life. He answered his mail by hand, including letters from strangers, at length, signing every one "your friend, Wendell Berry."
Dave once told Adam that Berry is his favorite person to read with whom he disagrees, and that line has stuck. Dave is not a pacifist. There are foundational places where he and Berry part ways. But reading Berry sharpened his own thinking precisely because the case on the other side was so well made, so obviously pondered and re-pondered over decades. Not rookie opinions. Not virgin thoughts. Which raises a question worth sitting with: who do you read that you disagree with? Most men cannot answer it, and that is the problem.
Berry's own account of what the land taught him: patience, because the crop keeps its own schedule and will not wait for you. Consequence, because there is no control-Z on a hillside. He plowed and dug a pond on sloping Kentucky ground and then watched it wash out, taking with it topsoil that had taken a thousand years to accumulate a millimeter at a time. Scale, because the land you keep is known intimately by you and nobody else, which spots bloom first, which die first, and holding that in your head is closer to a virtue than a skill. The body as a means of knowing, because the health of the mind proves itself in physical work. And fidelity to one place over time. Asked by NPR in 1998 what he would tell young people, he said stop some place and stay there, and learn the history of it, the names of the plants and the animals and your neighbors.
Adam brought in Josef Pieper to name what that is. Working hard is not the opposite of sloth. The opposite of sloth is the glad acceptance of your own life. A man can be busy at every hour of the day and still be a slothful man, because the busyness is a way of refusing the life he actually has.
Dave read The World-Ending Fire on Adam's recommendation and could not get past a passage early on about the difference between a path and a road. A path is submissive to the terrain. It yields to creation, goes through the trees, puts you in nature instead of over it. A path is almost a virtue, a habit of travel, a memory you relive, an inheritance you walk because others walked it first. A road does violence to it. You level the ground and go through instead of being part of it.
Which sets up the essay. In 1987 Berry published "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," and it went on to become the most reprinted thing he ever wrote, which is its own joke. He gave nine standards a new tool ought to meet: cheaper than what it replaces, no bigger in scale, demonstrably better at the work, less energy, ideally powered by something like the body, repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence with ordinary tools, purchasable and repairable near home, sold by a small shop that will take it back, and the hard one, number nine: it should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, including family and community relationships. We have almost entirely stopped asking that one. We look at output and never at cost, and technology almost always charges its cost in person-to-person contact.
His three reasons were dependence, household, and self-deception. Dependence on strip-mined Kentucky coal to run the thing. Household, because the model being discarded was his wife, Tanya, his editor, his critic, his closest reader and fellow worker, and going up to date as a writer would have meant sacrificing an association he treasured and depended on. That reason is what critics went after hardest, feminism being what it was in 1987, and he answered them in print. Self-deception last, and best: he simply did not believe anyone writes better with a computer than with a pencil. Show him work demonstrably better than Dante's, demonstrably attributable to the machine, and he would speak of computers in a more respectful tone of voice, though he still would not buy one.
The guys are fair to it and to themselves. Dante is not a fair standard, since nobody in the 300 years before the computer wrote as well as Dante either. But the point underneath it holds. Berry wrote in pencil because when you cross out a word and write another above it, the path you traveled is still visible in front of you, the way a footpath is. And there is something sacramental about it. The pencil hitting the paper is the incarnation of a thought. The labor is not an obstacle to the writing. The labor is the writing, and the satisfaction of finally getting a sentence to say what you actually meant is only available to the man who did the wrestling.
Which is where AI comes in, one week after the guys spent a whole episode on it. You do not appreciate a well-kept lawn until you have kept one. You do not appreciate a tomato until you have grown one. You do not appreciate writing until you have done it. Hand the wrestling to a word-guessing machine and the sentence still arrives, but it is sterile, generic, recognizable on sight to anyone who has ever fought for a line. AI is contraceptive language. There is no fecundity in it. The guys expect a backlash, the same pullback that is already happening with social media among the young, once enough people notice what got traded away. Berry's whole vocation was to turn our minds back toward the ground. Which, as Dave pointed out, is where the first man got both his name and his job: adam from adamah, formed out of the earth and made for the earth, a husband to the soil before there was ever any sin to explain it. That is not nostalgia. That is the job. Go read him. You will not agree with everything. Neither do they. Protect the labor. Provide something you actually made. Establish a place and stay in it. May the mad farmer rest with the eternal farmer. Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Whether a man actually gets wiser as he gets older, and why a sinful life makes him dumber instead
Dave turning 40 and why he was looking forward to it in a way he never looked forward to 30
The forties as a decade of proficiency and self-mastery instead of learning everything for the first time
A spiritual down, and relying on intellectual habit when things you know to be sinful start looking not that bad
Adam's two piglets from Dave's sow, and a pig pen contemplated since last fall
A piglet clearing the boards twenty seconds after being let in, and getting caught by a back leg
Beer of the week: Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the case for beer that