Sword&Spade

Jerry LoCoco grew up in a trailer in rural Yuma, Arizona, the son of a violent father and a mother who became a meth addict when he was thirteen, and he spent years hiding that background behind a law degree and one accomplishment after another. None of it healed him. He joins Jason Craig to talk about the masks men build as boys, his novel, Gringo Salado, and the habits of silence, prayer, reading, and writing that finally began to heal his wounds.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why Jerry sees poverty, not race, as the true enemy of kids raised in chaos
• How the coping habits that keep a child safe, like sorting every person into good or bad, start damaging a grown man’s relationships
• Why a law degree couldn’t heal his wounds
• What mimetic desire is, and how chasing what other men have leaves you empty
• Why feeling lost around forty can be a tug toward God rather than an excuse for a midlife crisis

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• Gringo Salado, A Story of Faith, Hope, and Love
• Disordered Self Love, How It Saves and Then Destroys
• David Torkington

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Chapters:

• 00:00: Judging people raised in chaos
• 02:39: Where the name Gringo Salado came from
• 07:37: Poverty runs deeper than race
• 17:22: A book that opened in his hometown
• 23:53: Why a man has to understand his wounds
• 36:11: The Thanksgiving play and the mask
• 50:13: Mimetic desire and the treadmill of wanting
• 59:50: Finding silence at Mass
• 01:09:20: When nothing works at forty
• 01:14:55: Looking beyond your own home

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

Marcellino D'Ambrosio spent years in youth ministry trying to win kids back from the school day and the sports schedule. It didn't work. He joins Jason Craig again to explain why Catholic men have mistaken their calling for a religious one, and why the real work in front of fathers is building a culture their children can actually live inside.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why the Great Commission was addressed to the clergy, and why hospitality is the layman's evangelical virtue
• How small acts among men—a feast-day barbecue, a bottle of whiskey for every new father—build the culture that keeps kids Catholic
• Why retention, not evangelization, is the church's real problem
• Why a parish or apostolate job can stall a young man's vocation
• The difference between chasing status and earning honor among men who know you

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• Marcellino's First Appearance on Sword&Spade (Spotify)
• Marcellino's First Appearance on Sword&Spade (Apple Podcasts)
• Sherwood Fellows
• Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII

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Chapters:

• 00:00: Leo XIII's overlooked call to rebuild the guilds
• 05:51: The evangelization mindset Catholic men inherited
• 11:17: The Great Commission and the layman's real job
• 16:51: Men as the builders of Catholic culture
• 20:55: Start with a feast-day barbecue
• 27:54: The church's real problem is retention
• 33:02: When a new pastor shuts down a men's chapter
• 37:45: Why young men shouldn't take parish jobs
• 42:07: Chasing status vs. earning honor
• 53:09: Building for a hundred years from now

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Adam Taylor, a former Marine and the son of Poetic Knowledge author James Taylor, has spent the last six years teaching his father's vision of education at St. Martin's Academy and is now co-founding St. Joseph's Academy in Mississippi. He tells Jason Craig how the goodness of his childhood carried him through a family tragedy and years apart from his father. He also makes the case that education has to reach the heart before the mind can build on it, a truth he says even classical schools can forget.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• What poetic knowledge is—the sensory, emotional way we come to know and love reality—and what Dickens's Hard Times shows about an education that deals only in facts
• How Adam came to terms with his father's failings in the years after the accident that took his mother and three siblings
• Why a father who admits fault and lets his son into his suffering keeps a bridge open to that son
• How real encounters form the imagination, and why Adam calls formation "a way to achieve prudence before your time"
• Why boys need to make and break things, even as high school seniors

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James S. Taylor
• St. Joseph's Academy
• Cornbread Catholic
• Catholics' Lost Cause by Adam L. Tate

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Chapters:

• 00:00: Adam Taylor, James Taylor, and John Senior's legacy
• 02:46: What poetic knowledge is, and the horse in Hard Times
• 10:17: A childhood immersed in the real
• 17:58: Seeing a father's failings, and the accident at fourteen
• 23:35: Letting your son into your suffering
• 26:11: How the Marines began the healing
• 31:10: What poetic knowledge looked like at home
• 38:59: Imagination and prudence before your time
• 46:02: Where classical education falls short
• 53:25: St. Joseph's Academy, Cornbread Catholic, and the Catholic South

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Jason Craig asks Dr. Dan Schneider, author of The Liber Christo Method, whether the Catholic fascination with exorcism is actually helping men fight. Schneider argues the real battle runs through a man's own senses and the wounds he hasn't dealt with, and Craig adds that a man who won't face those wounds leaves his family to carry them. 

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why an unholy curiosity about the devil backfires, and why Schneider ranks the demon third in any battle plan, behind Christ and the obstacles blocking grace
• How the demon of impurity doubles as the demon of fear, and why confessing the same sin over and over can miss the unhealed wound underneath it
• Small mortifications to start with, like giving up meat on Fridays
• What the imprecatory psalm about dashing babies on the rock teaches about crushing vices early
• Why a husband's authority comes down to two duties: provide and protect

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• The Liber Christo Method by Dr. Dan Schneider
• Holy League Institute
• The Spiritual Combat by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli
• Unseen Warfare, edited by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and St. Theophan the Recluse

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 03:09: Why Exorcism Content Has Exploded
• 07:46: The Enemy in the Mirror and the Five Senses
• 17:06: Why Impurity and Fear Share a Demon
• 24:00: How the Demon Plays Off Your Algorithm
• 28:07: Training One Virtue at a Time
• 31:38: Small Mortifications and Mental Prayer
• 35:13: Crushing Vices While They Are Small
• 46:02: Where a Father Should Start at Home
• 54:54: God Will Ask About Your Family

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Jason Craig sits down with philosopher, homesteader, and Christendom College professor John Cuddeback, author of The Intentional Household, to ask why a home no longer becomes a household on its own. They work through the ordinary parts of family life—meals, manners, diapers, shared work, the care of the elderly—and why these are exactly where a household is either built or lost. Dr. Cuddeback makes the case that the father who wants a real home has to know what he is building before he can decide what to keep out of it.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why an unintentional household doesn't stop people from mattering—it just stops the home from being run as though they do
• Why it is not an accident that babies need changing several times a day, and what that daily closeness was designed to communicate to a child who cannot yet understand a word
• The one place to start when the whole project feels out of reach: the family meal, eaten together with bodily presence, manners, and unhurried conversation, no matter where the food came from
• Why manners are the beginning of morals, why the father has to model them before he enforces them, and why formality deepens relationships instead of stiffening them
• Why restriction alone never wins the argument with technology—the question is what the screen is replacing, and whether there is a life worth protecting behind it

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• The Intentional Household by John Cuddeback
• LifeCraft
• Supra Dinner Society

Chapters:

• 00:00: Intro
• 03:09: Why a household now has to be built on purpose
• 09:58: Life gets harder as it gets better
• 15:40: The part that falls apart without the father
• 21:01: Start with the meal, whatever is on the plate
• 25:34: What a child learns at a table the father leads
• 36:58: Hospitality is the layman's way of preaching
• 41:53: You cannot say no to a screen without a yes to something
• 50:18: The home that only consumes
• 59:10: Growing old inside the household

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

When a thousand women who had abortions were asked who they consulted about the decision, the father of the baby came out first, and by a wide margin the most influential no matter what he said. 

Alexander Hettinga leads the fatherhood and family team at Care Net, a network of more than 1,300 pregnancy centers, and he tells Jason Craig what happens when those men are finally spoken to as fathers rather than handled as the problem.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The 2015 study that found the father of the baby is both the first person a woman consults about an abortion and the single greatest influence on her decision
• Why roughly a third of these fathers say nothing at all, and what "I'll support whatever you choose" actually sounds like to her
• Alexander's invitation to the father who has raised his own family well and now feels useless against everything else he sees
• Why Alexander pushes back on the room full of donated diapers, and what he wants pregnancy centers to do instead
• What a settled, married father can learn from men starting with nothing, including why the earlier a dad gets involved the better

Resources Mentioned:

• The Musical Father
• Care Net Fatherhood & Family
• Doctor Dad
• Fraternus

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 02:51: A violinist who fell in love with fatherhood
• 06:00: The research that put the father at the center of her decision
• 09:49: The forty percent who recommend abortion, and one client who had nothing
• 17:18: Why serving the father is central, not mission drift
• 25:35: Bravado or gentleness, and what actually reaches these men
• 31:56: "You might think you're the Uber driver today, but you're not"
• 34:10: The smoothies that saved lives
• 44:37: Fatherhood starts at conception
• 57:06: Bach, twenty children, and work-family polyphony

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Jason Craig sits down with Brandon Sheard of Farmstead Meatsmith, a professed melancholic who set out to build a walled Eden where virtue would grow on trees. Instead, he found that he had picked every battle at once—home education, home medicine, home food, the family business—and run out of hours, energy, and gas. They talk about what limitation teaches a father, why the children raised in that garden went places he never scoped out for them, and what it costs a man to omit rather than lead.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The crisp, detailed vision of an ordered homestead that a perfectionist cannot reach, and the technique for everything that gums up the works
• Eutrapelia, the virtue of right recreation, and why a man who calls hand-milking the cow his play has not learned it
• The whole slate of battles picked at the start—home education, no doctor visits, all the food, the family business—and the sheer limitation that ends it
• Education as the meeting of two freedoms, and the son who wrote a screenplay instead of reciting Purgatorio at the milking stand
• The pile of omission that outweighs anything a father does imperfectly, and why sloth, not lust or pride, is the father's real problem

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• Farmstead Meatsmith
• Fraternus Membership
• The Spiritual Combat by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli
• Find Your Fight: Rugged Wisdom for Faithful Dads Who Refuse to Settle by Tyler Blanski

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 04:28: A Melancholic's Perfectionism and the Walled Eden
• 09:41: Picking Every Battle at Once
• 14:29: Sheer Limitation and the End of the Energy Reserves
• 20:22: Education as the Meeting of Two Freedoms
• 26:13: Father Actively and the Pile of Omission
• 31:17: Sloth, Not Lust, Is the Father's Problem
• 36:54: Creating the Conditions Where Virtue Is Less of a Struggle
• 45:07: Circling the Wagons and the Corruption Inside
• 52:48: Lauren, Matrimony, and Turning Hearts to Children

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Jason Craig talks with Shawn and Beth Dougherty, who bought the worst land in Ohio, spent years growing food on it, and now live in a house their own children built. They cover why college stopped looking like a necessary rite of passage, why a young couple should start out poor, and how a family takes back the work it has proxied out to industry. Weddings, funerals, food, and heat all come home in the process.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why Sean taught theater for 25 years as a means to an end, and how the whole arrangement was aimed at land and summers with the kids
• Why half their kids went to college and half didn't, and why neither path counted as a necessary rite of passage
• What a marriage misses when it goes straight from daddy's castle to hubby's castle without a season of having nothing but each other
• How the homeschool world became a matriarchy, and what happens when dad comes home and doesn't fit
• Why the natural economy gives back more than you take, and how the cash economy inserts itself between a family and the Creator

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• One-Cow Revolution by Shawn and Beth Dougherty
• The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty
• The Liturgy of the Land by Jason Craig and Thomas Van Horn

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 06:02: A Lifetime of Choosing the Alternative
• 13:06: College Is Not a Necessary Rite of Passage
• 20:15: Start Out Poor
• 32:05: The Homeschool Matriarchy and the Absent Father
• 40:18: The Family as a Productive Economic Unit
• 44:15: The Wedding Industry
• 51:47: What We've Proxied Out and How to Take It Back
• 59:24: Scarcity in Banking, Abundance in Creation
• 1:09:20: Human Scale

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Recording on location at the Kingfisher Folkfest, Jason Craig puts a blunt question to an expert panel featuring Adam Taylor of St. Martin's Academy, Thomas Fickley of St. Dunstan's Academy, and educational consultant Patrick Faus. That question? How do you keep your homeschool from emasculating your son? 

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why anthropology determines formation, and what changes in a boy around twelve to fourteen
• Christopher Alexander's teenage cottage, and why the walls of a boy's childhood keep him a boy
• John Senior's objection to homeschooling, and the full arc Adam's father traveled on it
• What a father with only two hours a day can actually do, and why asking him to be a second mother fails
• Why the brotherhood a man keeps among other men is the thing his sons beg to join

Resources Mentioned:

• Fraternus
• The Ways of the Fathers
• St. Martin's Academy
• St. Dunstan's Academy
• The Children's Tradition
• Adam Taylor at the Cornbread Catholic Conference 

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 03:15: Anthropology Determines Formation
• 05:56: The Age When a Boy Needs Men
• 08:41: The Teenage Cottage and the Walls of Boyhood
• 13:08: Egalitarianism Is Not a Homeschool Problem
• 18:20: John Senior's Objection to Homeschooling
• 30:36: What a Father Does With Two Hours
• 35:45: Responsibility, Risk, and the Boy at Your Elbow
• 44:26: They Don't Want an Education, They Want to Be Known
• 54:15: Brotherhood Is What Your Boys Beg to Join

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Joel Trumbo spent ten months a year overseas doing embassy security work before he took a teaching job that barely covered his mortgage and turned a childhood obsession with illuminated manuscripts into a business. In this conversation with Jason Craig, Joel walks through building Tamburn Manor—the hand-painted books, the cabins his high school sons live in, the forest school on his property—and makes the case that a man's real power sits inside his own household, not out in the political realm.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why truth started Joel's move toward the Church but beauty is what kept him there
• Sitting in on his father's Old English class at ten and deciding Beowulf should be illuminated
• The two Adamic archetypes—the gardener who sets conditions and the craftsman who makes—and what each asks of a father
• Building cabins for his high school sons, and the senior project that would put a half acre in each boy's name
• The tiny house on a trailer, five kids, and the teepee his wife vetoed

Resources Mentioned

• Fraternus
• Tamburn Manor
• Illuminated Beowulf Book
• Tamburn Bindery
• The Arthuriad

Chapters

• 00:00: Introduction
• 02:07: Converted by Beauty
• 08:13: Craftsmanship as Stepping Into the Arena
• 13:22: The Tiny House on a Trailer
• 16:51: The Teaching Job, the Pay Cut, and the Side Business
• 23:14: Illuminating Beowulf at Ten Years Old
• 29:24: Building Catholic Culture vs. Branding It
• 38:27: Tamburn Manor and the Two Adamic Archetypes
• 46:03: A Homestead Across Generations
• 53:58: The One Craft Every Man Should Try

JOIN 2500+ MEN READING SERIOUS, YET ACCESSIBLE ESSAYS ON VIRTUE, CULTURE, AND LIVING WELL: https://fraternus.org/sword-and-spade/

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.