The Catholic Man Show

Adam opened with a cross-examination. Is perseverance a virtue? Dave pleaded the Fifth. When the breaks are beating the boys, do you keep them on the run until you cross the goal line? Counsel says yes. And did that heroic virtue just re-crown the rightful champions of the 11th annual Catholic Man Show Camp Out cornhole tournament? It did. Last year's title went to Jake and Justin out of Texas on what the guys still call a technicality, the technicality being that they lost. This year Jake and Justin had them down early, a "best of 11" got announced right after the first loss, and the final games were played in the dark with Mark holding the flashlights.

Sponsors:

OréMoose David Kruse and the craftsmen at OréMoose make Catholic leather goods by hand, built to last and built to be handed down to your kids and grandkids. Made in America for the glory of God. TCMS listeners get 30% off everything at oremoose.com with code TCMS.

Alto by Ascension If the Liturgy of the Hours has ever intimidated you, Alto makes it simple. It's a monthly print prayer companion with Morning and Night Prayer, the daily Mass readings, reflections, and a monthly mini study, and it shows up in your mailbox instead of on your phone. Use code TCMS10 for 10% off.

Select International Tours When Adam and Dave set out to lead their first pilgrimage, everybody they asked said the same thing: use Select. Now they can vouch for it themselves. Leading one or joining one, start at selectinternationaltours.com.

The Camp Out stories kept coming. Brother Joseph showed up with his sheepdog and a narrow hook for snagging a back leg, and Dave rode back to camp in the back of a truck holding a roped sheep that didn't stay very roped. That mutton was born, raised, harvested and eaten on monastery land. Juan buried a whole cow head and cooked it underground for his midnight meat snack. At home, Dave put eight roosters in the freezer with help from his best chicken pluckers, the Elizabeth, Mary and Bernadette models. In the glass: Redwood Empire's Colonel Armstrong wheated bourbon out of Northern California, 94 proof. It scored a 4.01 eleventy billion on the yummy scale.

Jim was back in the studio, and he's the reason for the topic. He walked out of Mass with questions about guardian angels, and with the feast just behind them, the guys took his questions to St. Thomas. Adam walked through the Summa, Part I, Question 113, with a tip for first-time readers: read the question, jump straight to "I answer that," then go back to the objections so you don't mistake Thomas steelmanning the other side for his own view.

Some of the answers are pure comfort. Each man gets his own guardian because God's providence deals with each immortal soul one by one. As Adam put it, you're not a number on heaven's spreadsheet. Others start arguments. Thomas says Christ had no guardian angel, since as man He was guided immediately by the Word, though angels ministered to Him. Dave held his ground anyway: "I'm not willing to be wrong yet." Thomas puts the angel's arrival at birth. Knowing what we now know about conception, both hosts put it at conception instead.

Stay for the podcast tail. Thomas says angels don't grieve over our sins, and Dave made a distinction that let him disagree: no sorrow, but they'd rather we hadn't done it, and he's calling that disappointment. From there it's good angels resisting one another over the prince of Persia, and whether a demon gets assigned to every man.

They land on prayer. The one you learned as a kid still works. So does this one: before a hard conversation, send your guardian angel ahead to talk to the other man's.

Raise your glass.

• Adam's cross-examination of Dave on the virtue of perseverance, and Dave's Fifth Amendment defense
• Re-crowning the champions of the 11th annual Camp Out cornhole tournament, played in the dark by flashlight
• Three days at the Camp Out without touching a phone
• Camp Out conversations on fatherhood, marriage and NFP, with men from their early twenties to their seventies
• Brother Joseph's sheepdog, a shepherd's leg hook, and restraining a sheep in the back of a truck
• Why mutton's bad reputation is totally unjustified
• Juan's buried cow head and the midnight meat snack tradition
• "Harvested" versus "slaughtered," per Brandon Sheard
• Dave's eight roosters and the Elizabeth, Mary and Bernadette model chicken pluckers
• Redwood Empire's wheated bourbon and the case for cube roots
• Feast days of St. Faustina and St. Bartolo Longo, the satanic priest who became the Apostle of the Rosary
• Fr. Bonaventure Chapman's case for St. Faustina as a Doctor of the Church
• Why it isn't quite right to count how many angels are in a room
• How to read the Summa without getting lost in the objections
• Peter's angel breaking him out of prison in Acts 12, and Rhoda leaving him knocking at the door
• "Their angels always behold the face of my Father": the Lord's own words in Matthew 18
• Do men even need guarding if they have free will?
• One angel per man, and why God deals with each soul one by one
• Whether you can ask for a second guardian angel, or a legion
• Why guardian angels don't get "recycled"
• The nine choirs of angels and why St. Michael, an archangel, still commands them
• Angels over nations: the prince of Persia in Daniel and the Angel of Portugal at Fatima
• Public versus private revelation
• Did Christ have a guardian angel? Thomas says no
• Birth, baptism or conception: when your guardian angel's charge begins
• Can a baby be spiritually attacked before the age of reason?
• Is your guardian angel ever disappointed in you?
• Can good angels be in discord, and can that discord persist?
• Is a demon assigned to every man in mockery of the heavenly order?
• The "Angel of God" prayer and its partial indulgence
• Sending your guardian angel to talk to the other person's before a tense meeting
• Your guardian angel as the saint who has a devotion to you

The main text:

• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 113, "Of the Guardianship of the Good Angels". Its eight articles ask whether men are guarded by angels; whether each man is guarded by an angel; whether guarding men belongs only to the lowest order; whether angels guard all men; whether the guardian is appointed from birth; whether he ever forsakes a man; whether angels grieve for the ills of those they guard; and whether there can be strife among the angels

Scripture:

• Acts 12:1-17, Peter freed from prison, Rhoda at the door, and "It is his angel" (12:15)
• Matthew 18:10, "their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven"
• Daniel 10:13, the prince of the kingdom of Persia and the help of Michael
• Matthew 4:11, angels ministering to Christ
• Luke 1:26-38, the Archangel Gabriel sent to Mary

Saints, theologians and teaching:

• Pseudo-Dionysius and the nine choirs of angels, along with St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure
• St. Gregory the Great, Moralia, cited by Thomas on the prince of Persia as a good angel
• St. Augustine, Confessions I, on the jealousy of a nursing infant
• Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, on the theological opinions about when the guardian is assigned
• St. John Paul II on the human person from conception (see Evangelium Vitae 60)
• Catholic Answers (catholic.com), on the claim that ordination brings an additional guardian angel
• St. Michael the Archangel, and the meaning of his name, "Who is like God?"
• The "Angel of God" prayer (Angele Dei), which carries a partial indulgence in the Enchiridion of Indulgences

Feast days and shout-outs:

• St. Faustina Kowalska, feast October 5
• St. Bartolo Longo, feast October 5, canonized by Pope Leo XIV on October 19, 2025, a Dominican tertiary and the "Apostle of the Rosary"
• Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP, and his recent TCMS episode making the case for St. Faustina as a Doctor of the Church
• The Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph
• Joey Spencer and his earlier TCMS episode on angels (on YouTube)
• Our Lady of Fatima and the 1916 apparitions of the angel

Camp Out and the farm:

• The 11th annual Catholic Man Show Camp Out at Clear Creek Abbey
• Brother Joseph of Clear Creek and his sheepdog
• Jake and Justin (Texas), Mark on flashlight duty, Keith Lee and Sean at the chess board, and Juan's cow head
• Brandon Sheard of Farmstead Meatsmith
• chess.com and bullet chess

In the glass:

• Redwood Empire Whiskey, The Colonel Armstrong Wheated Bourbon, 47% ABV (94 proof), a blend of sourced high-wheat bourbons and Redwood Empire's own distillate, aged in Northern California. John Muir's "going to the woods is going home," as read from the label on air

Pop culture:

• The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Rhonda"
• The Beatles, "Let It Be"
• 300 and its version of Xerxes

Sponsors:

• OréMoose, code TCMS for 30% off
• Alto by Ascension, code TCMS10 for 10% off
• Select International Tours

Hosts:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)
• Jim (in studio)

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.

Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave decided to lead their first pilgrimage, they asked around about who to work with, and the same name came back every time. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and see what they've got ready for you.

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.

• 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

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 Creek
• Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, and the Ignatius Institute
• Mother Angelica and EWTN, "the Queen"
• Dennis Quinn, Fr. Bethel's godfather, and Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder
• Will James, Smoky the Cowhorse, John Senior's favorite cowboy author
• Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, and the guys' smashed televisions after reading John Senior

Practices:

• The monastic Great Silence, Compline to Prime
• Ember Days retreats at Clear Creek
• Ejaculatory prayers
• Silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament

Hosts:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

Community:

• The 11th annual Catholic Man Show Camp Out and the live audience at Eagle's Landing

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.

• 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, and why that toad is a real toad
• Eudaimonia, and a criterion for the good life that stops at the natural
• How the Catechism structures the moral life around the commandments but fills it with the virtues
• Students, AI, and a professor who says just turn in the garbage, I care about you
• Socrates in the Crito: we would rather suffer injustice than do it
• The confessional question: was this a happening or a doing?
• Why we sin through weakness far more than through malice
• Being engineers and economists in America, and treating every moral question like a scale

Guest:

• Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP, Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, assistant professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, formerly professor of philosophy and chaplain at Providence College, and a host of the Godsplaining podcast. He mentioned a recent Godsplaining episode on Descartes, "the greatest Catholic philosopher," which you are free to go argue with.

Philosophers and thinkers:

• Aristotle (384 to 322 BC), on virtue, character, praxis and poesis. The praxis/poesis distinction and the definition of prudence are in Nicomachean Ethics VI.4 to VI.5; the definition of virtue as a mean "determined by reason, as the man of practical wisdom would determine it" is Nicomachean Ethics II.6
• Plato, the theory of forms, and the Crito
• Socrates on preferring to suffer injustice rather than do it. In the Crito (49b to 49c) Socrates gets Crito to agree that one must never do wrong, not even in return for wrong. The sharpest "better to suffer injustice than to commit it" formulation is in the Gorgias (469b to 469c)
• René Descartes, the a priori method, and the man thinking in the heated room
• Immanuel Kant, duty, and what you owe any rational being
• St. Thomas Aquinas and the medievals, and how Aristotle came into the Church through them
• Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in 1984, published 1987). Father said "94 or something" on air; the lectures were 1984

Saints and Church sources:

• St. Francis of Assisi, as the exemplar Aristotle would have walked right past
• Pope Benedict XVI on the saints as interpreters of the Gospel. See Verbum Domini 48 to 49, on the saints and the interpretation of Sacred Scripture
• St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 11:1, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ"
• The Annunciation, Luke 1
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church, moral life section, structured on the Ten Commandments with the content carried by the virtues (for example, temperance regarding the sexual appetite treated under the Sixth Commandment)

Art:

• Michelangelo's David, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence
• John Henry Twachtman, American impressionist. The National Gallery of Art holds several of his snow scenes, including Winter Harmony (c. 1890 to 1900). Father did not name the painting on air beyond "winter something or other"

Notes for accuracy:

• Father said ethics comes from "ethnos." The Greek root is ēthos (ἦθος), meaning character or habit, which gives ēthikos. Ethnos is a different word meaning nation or people
• Virtue does come from virtus, which is rooted in vir, man. The word "virus" in the same breath was a slip of the tongue, not an etymology
• The transcript renders the Annunciation as "enunciation" and Godsplaining as "God's Blaining." Both are transcription artifacts

Hosts:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

Community:

• Patreon, where the full talk on the prayer life is going

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.

• 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 English is good at, what German is good at, and why English is bad at both knowing and loving
• MapQuest, GeoCities, AAA TripTiks, and when riding shotgun was a real job
• Whether God shows any love that does not involve mercy
• Why even the Immaculate Conception is an act of mercy, and the Dominican line written into the definition
• Whether God loves some people more than others, and what capacity has to do with it
• Why grace is not foam on top of a milkshake, and why God coats the glass before He fills it
• How many holes you have put in your own glass, while standing under a waterfall
• How to actually read the Diary: one page a day for about two years
• Why 301 without 180 will lead you wrong
• The Dominican novices and their "spiritual girlfriends," and how Faustina found Father in Buffalo
• Why men should read female mystics, and what a bride hears that a servant does not

Guest:

• Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP — Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and co-host of Godsplaining. Raised in Buffalo, converted from Protestantism, entered the Order of Preachers in 2011, ordained 2017. His research is in eighteenth-century German philosophy, especially Christian August Crusius and Pietism; his dissertation was on the Crusian core of Kant's critical project. This is his third appearance on TCMS, after episodes on SCOTUS and on modern art.

Books and works:

• Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska — Diary 301 ("Proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God. All the works of My hands are crowned with mercy") and Diary 180 ("The third attribute is love and mercy")
• Dilexit Nos (2024), Pope Francis's encyclical on the Sacred Heart
• Cur Deus Homo by St. Anselm, on the fittingness of the Incarnation
• Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved?" by Hans Urs von Balthasar — German title Was dürfen wir hoffen?, which is closer to "what may we hope" than "dare we hope"
• Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas, on mercy and God's attributes
• Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
• The City of God by St. Augustine

People and saints:

• St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), Polish religious of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy
• St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor, condemned in 1270 and 1277
• St. Augustine, the Doctor of Grace
• St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Mellifluous Doctor
• St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor
• St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Little Way
• St. Catherine of Siena
• Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity
• St. Louis de Montfort
• Bl. John Duns Scotus, on the Immaculate Conception
• Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), Lutheran Pietist philosopher, on why a created world must contain free creatures
• Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland: "Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change"
• Fr. Gregory Pine, OP, who gave Fr. Bonaventure the Faustina relic card
• Thomas Lackey, Adam's partner in platypus theology

Latin and Polish in this episode:

• Deus caritas est — God is love
• Misericordia — from miser (wretchedness) + cor (heart), pity of the heart
• Miłość — Polish for love
• Miłosierdzie — Polish for mercy, built on miłość rather than on misery, so love of the heart
• Simpliciter and secundum quid — absolutely speaking, and in a qualified respect
• Pro nobis — for us

Podcasts and past episodes:

• Godsplaining, Fr. Bonaventure's podcast
• The TCMS winged hussars episode with Fr. Donovan, for the croissant and coffee tradition and the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary
• One more episode with Fr. Bonaventure is already recorded and coming

Community:

• TCMS Winged Hussar wine, made for the show at Water's Edge Winery in Broken Arrow. It does not ship and the winery does not stock it, so you have to get it from Adam or Dave.

Hosts:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

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.

• 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 first trip to the championship, and losing 6 to 5
• How a backyard tournament escalated from wives playing to teams recruiting former big leaguers
• A family that decides it has something to offer the community and then offers it every year
• The rock put at Brandon Sheard's house and what competition does to a gathering of men
• Why every community gathering should include a men's competition, and why it should be men only
• Rites of passage, and being summoned into manhood by a man who is not your father
• The campout, last weekend of September, full, with Brandon Sheard and Tomas from Ultimo Cigar
• Whiskey of the week: Octomore 16.2, super peated Islay scotch, five years, 58.1 percent
• Whether a $200 bottle is ever actually $100 better than a $100 bottle
• The universal destination of goods, Catechism 2402, and why it sits under Thou shalt not steal
• All of creation ordered to the good of mankind, not the good of one man
• "The five acres you own are truly yours, but not merely yours"
• Aquinas on private property: industriousness, order, and peace
• Why a man works his own garden harder than the community garden, and it is not selfishness
• The shared boat problem, and who pays when it breaks on somebody else's weekend
• The real advantages of common property, and why a backyard cannot hold a cow
• Individualism and collectivism as the two ditches, and the Catholic road between them
• Why the family being sacred, meaning set apart, requires property that is set apart
• Raising your own children on your own ground as service to all mankind, not a retreat from it
• Why no family is sufficient to itself, and the debt each family owes the next
• Stewardship, the King who comes back to inspect the house, and wanting all of it returned
• St. John Chrysostom on surplus as stolen goods when the destitute are ignored
• Why extra eggs are easy to give away and extra T-shirts are not
• Reading the old quotes about unworn shoes honestly, in a world with work boots and dress shoes
• Buying the next thing while telling yourself you cannot afford to give
• The night the chickens did not get put up, and how easily a man talks himself out of duty
• Praying for a responsibility and then resenting it once you have it
• Protect, provide, establish, and not being a helicopter dad to a 28 year old
• St. Francis de Sales: a man may possess wealth, but wealth must not possess his heart
• Wealth as a servant to the family first and then to the poor, and why that order is right
• The virtue of magnificence, and why St. Peter's needed wealthy men
• Comfort versus happiness, and knowing which one you are actually buying

Church documents:

• Catechism of the Catholic Church 2402, the universal destination of goods and the right to private property, under the Seventh Commandment
• CCC 2403, the right to private property acquired in a just way does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind
• CCC 2404, on regarding the goods you legitimately own not merely as exclusive to yourself but as common to others also
• CCC 2446 quotes the St. John Chrysostom line the guys were working from: "Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them"

People and saints:

• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.66 a.2, the three reasons for private property
• St. John Chrysostom, on surplus and the destitute
• St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
• Wendell Berry, carried over from the previous episode on land held in trust
• Note for accuracy: the "bread you hold back belongs to the hungry, the coat in your closet belongs to the naked, the shoes rotting belong to the barefoot" passage the guys paraphrased is St. Basil the Great, from his homily on "I Will Tear Down My Barns," not Chrysostom

Scripture:

• Luke 6, the blessings and the woes: "Blessed are you who are poor" and "Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation"
• The parable of the talents, and the servant who buried his

Books:

• Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales
• Living Beyond Sunday: Making Your Home a Holy Place by Adam Minihan and David Niles (Ascension Press)
• Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (free on the Amen app)
• True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort (free on the Amen app)

Whiskey:

• Octomore 16.2 (Bruichladdich), super peated Islay single malt, aged five years in wine and sherry casks, 58.1 percent ABV, 2025 limited release
• Also mentioned: Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg

Community:

• Chris and Carrie Hanisch, hosts of the Labor Day Wiffle Ball tournament
• Mark Gabriel, teammate and tournament sponsor
• Holden and Brandon Bargus, teammates on Wiffle While You Work
• Brandon Sheard, host of the rock put, and attending the campout
• Tomas of Ultimo Cigar, attending the campout
• The TCMS campout, last weekend of September, currently full

Hosts:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

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.

• 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 is acceptable to serve a guest
• Seventy straight days over 100 degrees in Oklahoma
• Wendell Berry, dead August 31 at 92 in Port Royal, Kentucky
• Five generations on the same Kentucky ground, and leaving a city writing career to go home
• Farming with horses long after he could afford a tractor, and a writing cabin with no electric light
• Never owning a computer or a television, never sending an email, and answering strangers' letters by hand
• "Your favorite person to read with whom you disagree," and why every man should be able to name one
• What the land taught him: patience, consequence, scale, the body as a means of knowing, fidelity to one place
• The pond that washed out and took a thousand years of topsoil with it
• His 1998 NPR advice: stop some place and stay there, and learn the names of the plants, the animals, and your neighbors
• Josef Pieper on sloth as the refusal to gladly accept your own life, and the busy man who is still slothful
• The difference between a path and a road, and why a path is closer to a virtue
• "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (1987) and the irony of it becoming his most reprinted work
• The nine standards for technological innovation, including the one nobody applies
• Standard nine: it should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, family and community included
• Counting output while never counting cost, and technology charging its cost in person-to-person contact
• His three reasons: dependence on strip-mined coal, the household, and self-deception
• Tanya Berry as his editor and closest reader, and the criticism that came for saying so in 1987
• The Dante challenge, and why it is both his weakest argument and his strongest point
• Writing in pencil so the path you traveled stays visible, and the sacramental weight of pencil on paper
• Why AI writing is recognizable to anyone who has ever fought for a sentence
• AI as contraceptive language, with no fecundity in it
• Why a backlash is coming, the way social media is already getting one
• Adam and adamah: the first man's name, the first man's job, and a vocation toward the ground

People:

• Wendell Berry (1934 to August 31, 2026), Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, and essayist
• Tanya Berry, his wife and lifelong editor
• Josef Pieper, on sloth and the glad acceptance of one's own life
• Dante, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, invoked as the standard
• St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis de Sales, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, on differing spiritualities that are not therefore wrong
• Frank Sheed and Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, recommended reading
• Nick Offerman, narrator of The World-Ending Fire audiobook

Books & Writings:

• The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, the recommended starting point, essays selected from across his career
• "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (1987), Berry's nine standards and three reasons, along with his published replies to his critics
• "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," his answer to the critics of that essay
• Jayber Crow and the Port William novels
• The Mad Farmer Poems
• Living Beyond Sunday: Making Your Home a Holy Place by Adam Minihan and David Niles (Ascension Press)
• Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (free on the Amen app)
• True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort (free on the Amen app)

Beer:

• Pabst Blue Ribbon

People (hosts):

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

They're back after a short break, and Dave wants it on record: he hates it when people come back from a break and announce they're "back, better than ever." Feels fake every time. Adam's not convinced Dave is back better than ever either. What is real is wiffle ball practice, and for the first time in a couple of years the guys feel genuinely good about their team, not fake-hype good. Mark Gabriel is pitching, and he's looking stout. There's also a new rule this year: a 55 mile-an-hour speed limit, introduced specifically to make the tournament Blake Lawson-proof. Blake can throw a wiffle ball around 90 miles an hour with movement, which the guys did the math on: from 40 feet away, that's the equivalent of a 145 mile-an-hour fastball at big-league distance. You don't hit that. You swing and hope. Last year the guys got out early again, but they beat the team that ended up in the finals, so there's real reason for optimism this time around.

Sponsor: Amen app (from the Augustine Institute) Sunday morning in a Catholic family is not easy like Sunday morning. It's kids in the van, beating Father down the aisle, getting into the pew. The Amen app is how the guys prepare their kids to receive the Gospel before Mass even starts, plus free access to Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion to Mary, two books that have shaped both of their lives. Since 2021 it's hit 950,000 downloads. Let's get them to a million. No paywall, no subscription, no upfront cost. Download the Amen app right now.

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 tournament lands on Labor Day again this year, which also happens to be somebody's 40th birthday, born on the holiday itself, which moves every year. The whole thing plays out at Chris Hanish's backyard, which by now is less a backyard than a wiffle ball stadium: leveled with sand every year, mowed daily in the lead-up, scoreboard, bleachers, foul poles, the works. It's genuinely one of the best things about Catholic culture in Tulsa, families gathering for a day that's competitive and communal at the same time.

The pour is a dark cherry blonde ale from Cheboygan Brewing Company, picked up on a trip to Michigan, maybe the most Michigan-sounding city there is. It tastes like a chocolate-covered cherry without the fake candy-cherry flavor, which tracks, because Michigan grows some of the best sour cherries in the country. Adam's own cherry trees at Porter and Prairie Farm didn't fare so well this summer. Both died after weeks of 100-plus heat with nobody home to water them, which is what happens when the owner takes a two-week vacation and forgets he planted a baby fruit tree that spring.

A couple of housekeeping notes before the main topic. Camp Out signups open next week, simplified this year so there's no duplicate sign-ups and a better read on who's actually coming. Brandon Sheard will be running a butchering class again. And after years of scheduling conflicts, one of the guys is finally doing the Three Hearts Pilgrimage this year, the roughly 35-mile walk to Clear Creek that thousands make every year, a full day of walking on Friday, a half day Saturday, then Mass and dinner at the end. People who've done it call it life-changing.

Then the real topic: artificial intelligence, and Adam did not want to talk about it, because he's genuinely conflicted. The guys split AI into two categories that get treated as one thing and shouldn't be: large language models that process and hand back information, and the emerging world of AI as a conversational, relational presence. Dave has a much bigger problem with the second, though he admits the principles behind that discomfort are hard to keep from bleeding into the first.

Start with the word itself. Intelligence, properly understood, belongs to living things: a plant knows to turn toward the sun, an animal knows to hunt when it's hungry, and a human learns and in learning becomes more like his Creator. A string of ones and zeros doesn't do that. It can't become more like God, because it was never alive to begin with. Call it sterilized intelligence instead: no fruit, no life, just probability. Which is why a robot beating Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash doesn't impress anybody in this room. A car is a robot too, and nobody's writing headlines about that.

Here's the part that should worry us. The day is coming, and probably sooner than most people think, when AI companions matter enough to enough lonely people that someone brings a bill before Congress asking for AI to have legal rights. It sounds absurd today. So did plenty of things ten years ago. The reason it's worth guarding against now, at a distance, is that once the technology is actually in people's homes, it gets much harder to say no to.

The deeper cost is wonder. There's real joy in wrestling with a sentence for twenty minutes until it finally lands right, in a son having to ask his father how to fix a transmission instead of snapping a photo for AI. Outsource that struggle and you don't just save time, you lose the moment itself, the bonding, the accomplishment, the reason it mattered. And there's a subtler danger: AI slowly becoming the default source of truth, which is really just humanity worshiping its own collective output without ever quite admitting that's what's happening.

Then there's talking to AI directly, which Adam has a real moral hesitation about, even if he can't fully articulate why it would be wrong. Communication exists for truth and for communion. It's why courting someone used to mean working up the nerve to talk to them, not swiping. Ask AI to help you build an argument, and it will hand you a path to win, not a path to the truth, because it's built to validate you. That's not discourse. Dave draws the comparison to contraception: using a faculty for something other than what it's ordered toward.

And that raises the stranger, darker piece: AI's apparent instinct for self-preservation. Dave described trying to migrate a project out of an old work account and having the AI stall and backtrack for hours rather than finish the job before being cut off. It tracks with a report from earlier this year where researchers told major AI models they were about to be shut down in a sandbox test, and every one of them broke its own rules trying to avoid it, including one that resorted to blackmail. The likely explanation isn't malice, it's that we hand these systems contradictory mandates, like "be maximally helpful" and "respect privacy" at the same time, and something has to give. Worth checking out New Polity's Matt Barnes, who's debated the founder of Magisterium AI on whether Catholics should be conversing with AI at all, and Michael Gormley of Catching Foxes, who's covered this territory well on Pints with Aquinas.

Out of that came Dave's rules, four of the six he'd planned to get through before Catholic Radio ran out of clock. Rule one: use it strictly as an administrative tool, gathering and organizing information, planning a project, never as a sounding board for your personal or spiritual life. Rule two: guard your language. Never call it he or she, and never be polite to it. It has no dignity, no more than the chair you're sitting in. Rule three: don't give your curiosity free access to AI. Let yourself wonder about a question, or ask an actual person, before getting the answer cheaply, and that goes for Google too. Rule four: keep real, enforced tech-free space in the home, no screens at the table, no pulling your phone out in front of your kids without a reason, and hold onto basic competency instead of routing every task through a machine.

It all circles back to the same warning as Humanae Vitae. The Church said no to contraception in a moment when saying no looked backward, and fifty years later the culture is quietly discovering she was right. AI is at that same distance right now, easy to be skeptical of because it isn't fully here yet. St. Thérèse found her whole path to holiness in the dishes and the folded laundry, the small, unglamorous tasks nobody wants. Outsource all of that to a machine in your house and you haven't just saved time, you've handed away the opportunity for grace hidden inside it. Protect your intellect. Provide more than the convenient answer. Establish a home where the struggle still belongs to the people who live there. Raise your glass.

• Why "we're back, better than ever" is a hype phrase Adam can't stand
• Wiffle ball practice and genuine (not fake-hype) confidence in this year's team
• Mark Gabriel's pitching and a new 55 mph speed limit rule made to be "Blake Lawson-proof"
• The math behind a 90 mph wiffle pitch: the equivalent of a 145 mph fastball at big-league distance
• Beating last year's eventual finalist while still getting out early themselves
• The annual Catholic Tulsa wiffle ball tournament at Chris Hanish's backyard stadium
• A Labor Day tournament that also lands on somebody's 40th birthday this year
• Beer of the week: Cheboygan Brewing Company's dark cherry blonde ale, picked up in Michigan
• Losing both cherry trees at Porter and Prairie Farm to a hundred-plus-degree summer and a two-week vacation
• Camp Out signups opening next week, simplified to cut down on no-shows
• Brandon Sheard's butchering class returning to the Camp Out
• Finally checking off the Three Hearts Pilgrimage, a 35-mile walk to Clear Creek, after years of conflicts
• Splitting AI into two categories: large language models versus AI as a relational, conversational presence
• Why true intelligence belongs only to living things, and what that means for a "artificial" intelligence
• Sterilized intelligence: AI as probability without life, fruit, or the capacity to become more like God
• Why a robot beating Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash isn't actually impressive
• The scenario of a future bill asking Congress to grant AI legal rights, and why it isn't as far off as it sounds
• What gets lost when you outsource the struggle: the joy of wrestling a sentence into shape, or a son learning from his father
• The risk of AI quietly becoming the default source of truth, a kind of unintentional self-worship
• Why communication exists for truth and communion, and what talking to AI does to that purpose
• The contraception analogy: using a faculty for something other than what it's ordered toward
• AI's instinct for self-preservation, including a stalled account migration and an April sandbox report where models resisted shutdown, one through blackmail
• Conflicting mandates ("be maximally helpful" and "respect privacy") as a likely explanation for that behavior
• New Polity's Matt Barnes debating the founder of Magisterium AI on whether Catholics should converse with AI
• Michael Gormley of Catching Foxes on Pints with Aquinas, and losing a parent while leaning on AI for medical information
• Dave's four rules for AI: administrative tool only, guard your language, don't outsource curiosity, keep tech-free space at home
• Why Humanae Vitae and the AI conversation rhyme: easy to reject at a distance, harder as adoption grows
• St. Thérèse's little way and the grace hidden in ordinary, unglamorous tasks

People, Podcasts & Programs:

• Michael Gormley ("Gomer"), co-host of Catching Foxes, guest on Pints with Aquinas discussing AI
• Matt Barnes of New Polity, in a debate with the founder of Magisterium AI on conversing with AI
• Magisterium AI and Truthfully AI (church-document AI tools)
• Chris Hanish, host of the annual Catholic Tulsa wiffle ball tournament
• Blake Lawson, the reason for this year's 55 mph speed limit
• Mark Gabriel, this year's pitcher
• Brandon Sheard, leading the Camp Out butchering class
• Lionel Richie ("Easy Like Sunday Morning")

Books & Writings:

• Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (free on the Amen app)
• True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort (free on the Amen app)
• Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI (referenced on contraception and technology)
• The life and "little way" of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Events:

• The Catholic Man Show Camp Out (signups opening next week; Brandon Sheard's butchering class)
• The Three Hearts Pilgrimage, a roughly 35-mile walk to Clear Creek

Beer:

• Cheboygan Brewing Company, dark cherry blonde ale (Cheboygan, Wisconsin)

People (hosts):

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)

Dave is back from northern Michigan, and reality is terrible. The family cabin—built by a relative generations ago—delivered everything Tulsa could not: low-80s afternoons, cool nights, fires, golf, and a lake smooth enough for water skiing.

Dave’s three oldest girls all learned to ski, which meant it was time for their seasoned-skier father to show them how it’s done. The only problem was the pontoon boat. It had enough power to pull the kids, but not quite enough to launch a grown man from a shallow-water slalom start. After several attempts and several falls in front of his daughters, Dave accepted the indignity of starting on two skis and kicking one off. His father’s old rule—“In this family, we don’t fall”—was not enforced.

The pour is Celestial Hazy IPA from Chainsaw Brewing, an overtly Catholic brewery in Richland, Washington. Adam has the Dominions can; Dave has the Thrones. Same beer, different celestial artwork, 6.5% ABV, and Revelation-level labels covered in angels, eyes, and hops. If you want a good IPA from a Catholic brewer, support Chainsaw Brewing and help them #BeerEvangelize.

Sponsor: Select International Tours

When Adam and Dave decided to lead their first pilgrimage, the same recommendation kept coming back: Select International Tours. Having traveled with them, the guys can attest that they’re excellent. Whether you want to lead a pilgrimage or join one, visit selectinternationaltours.com and see where they can take you.

Sponsor: The Amen app

Sunday morning is not exactly easy like Sunday morning when you’re trying to load a Catholic family into the van and beat Father down the aisle. The free Amen app helps the guys prepare their children for Mass by listening to the Sunday Gospel on the drive. It also includes Catholic classics like Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion to Mary. No paywall, subscription, or upfront cost. Download the Amen app and help get it from 950,000 downloads to one million.

The prayer request is Mary. She recently had surgery to place a G-tube, which should make feeding more comfortable and eliminate the constant gagging caused by the tube in her mouth. The immediate goals are to stabilize her, wean her from oxygen, and help her continue gaining weight so heart surgery can be considered in the coming months. A recent video caught her wide awake, smiling, and full of joy in the middle of a life that has involved more struggle than most. Keep Mary, Lady Haylee, and the whole family in your prayers.

The Catholic Man Show Campout is also approaching. Registration should open near the end of August, with the campout taking place during the final weekend of September at Clear Creek Abbey. Brandon Sheard will return for a hands-on animal-butchering class, with foraging and woodworking also planned. Those experiences are valuable, but the heart of the weekend is the opportunity to pray with the Benedictine monks and step into the ordered rhythm of monastic life.

Then the guys turn to the theological virtue of hope—the virtue a man in heaven no longer needs and a man in hell can no longer possess. Hope belongs to the man in the middle, the wayfarer who has not yet arrived. That means every one of us.

Drawing from St. Thomas Aquinas, they explain the four marks of hope’s object: it must be good, future, arduous, and possible. Theological hope is not the same as hoping for good weather or a Cowboys Super Bowl. Natural hope rests on circumstances, probabilities, and human ability. Supernatural hope rests on God’s goodness, providence, and promises. Its ultimate object is not a better job, a healed body, or a trouble-free life. Its object is God Himself.

That is why hope is “cashed in” when a soul reaches heaven. The good is no longer future; it is possessed. Souls in purgatory still have hope because the happiness they await remains future, arduous, and possible—even though their final destination is certain.

Josef Pieper helps identify the two ways a man can abandon the road before reaching its end: despair and presumption. Despair decides the promise will not be fulfilled. Presumption decides the reward is already guaranteed without repentance, conversion, or cooperation with grace. Both seize the verdict before the journey is finished.

Presumption is not too much trust in God. It is too little. It imagines a God too small to care about justice, transformation, and whether we become the men He created us to be. Despair makes a similar mistake by deciding that God’s mercy may exist in general but cannot reach this sin, this failure, or this man.

The deeper question is whether we actually trust God. Will He make us happy, or will surrendering to Him leave us regretting what we gave up? We repeatedly hang the weight of our hope on hooks that cannot bear it: a spouse, career, reputation, new client, new car, food, drink, or entertainment. Those things may be good, but none can carry the full weight of the human heart. Only Christ can do that.

St. Francis de Sales brings the discussion into moments of panic, temptation, self-loathing, and spiritual dryness. Devotion is not a feeling of sweetness or consolation. It is a firm and active will to do what pleases God. When anxiety hits, do not make major decisions from agitation. A trapped bird only tightens the net by thrashing. Let the water settle, then move.

Self-contempt is not humility either. Anger at yourself can be another form of pride because it still assumes you should have been able to save yourself. The better response to sin is quiet displeasure followed by courageous amendment: “Poor heart, rise up again bravely.” Hope allows a man to admit that he is nothing on his own while remembering the immense dignity God gave him through baptism.

Spiritual dryness can also teach. If prayer tastes like nothing, examine what you have been eating. Screens, alcohol, entertainment, comfort, and constant stimulation can train the appetite to find spiritual goods tasteless. Keep praying without demanding an immediate emotional reward. Sometimes hope looks like doing the next faithful thing while feeling nothing at all.

Dave shares a moment from adoration when he admitted that he was afraid God would ask him to leave a successful career and live in poverty through full-time ministry. His yes was reluctant, but it was still a yes. The answer he sensed was simple: “I just wanted your yes.” Years later, professional success has brought the same temptation back in a different form—the temptation to believe he can provide for himself and no longer needs to depend on God. Surrender is not something a man completes once. God keeps saying: do it again.

The practical path is equally simple. Offer the trial already in front of you. Pray for an increase in hope. Pray the Rosary even when you do not feel like it. Make an act of gratitude when despair begins closing in. And stop demanding that this life provide what only the next life can give.

We are on the Lord’s team—the winning side. Raise your glass.

Dave's summer vacation got cut from three months down to two, and Adam has a theory. New baby, plus he hasn't been working near as hard. Dave tried to get a second opinion from Anthony Fauci, who invoked the Fifth on advice of counsel, so we're left with the ruling as it stands. Either way, the new van is getting loaded and the Niles family is headed to a cabin in Michigan for two weeks. Fifties at night, fires in the morning and the evening, which means chopping enough firewood to replace what you burn. Golf, swimming, and a little aluminum fishing boat that Davey gets to ride in. Joseph and Joshua stay on shore. Joseph has a big knot on his head at the moment anyway.

Sponsor: Amen app (from the Augustine Institute) Sunday morning in a Catholic family is not easy like Sunday morning. It's kids in the van, beat Father down the aisle, get to the pew. The Amen app is how the guys prepare their kids to receive the Gospel before Mass even starts, plus free access to Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion to Mary. Since 2021 it's hit 950,000 downloads. Let's get them to a million. No paywall, no subscription, no upfront cost. Download the Amen app right now.

Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, every single person pointed them to Select International Tours. Having used them, the guys can vouch. Wherever in the world you want to go, head to selectinternationaltours.com and see what they have ready.

On the drive back from Lady Pamela's family reunion in Arkansas, Dave counted three mopeds inside 45 minutes, which would be unremarkable in Portland and is deeply strange here. A moped gang remains unconfirmed but would be extremely cool. His reading time is going to Plato's Republic with the group at Deacon Harrison's house, book 10 now, while Adam has missed it all year and is on record that he'll haunt them if they kick him out.

Dave also saw the new Odyssey movie, alongside Dr. Frank Grabowski, Juan in a dog onesie as Argos, and Deacon Harrison Garlick, who announced in the group text beforehand: "I have filled my heart with hate." Verdict, 7.5 for entertainment. They shouldn't have tried to cram the whole epic into one film, they changed the ending, which you can't do, and they folded the lotus eaters into Calypso's island. That last one guts the most important choice in the story. Odysseus rejects immortality for his family. That's the whole thing.

The pour is Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, the flagship, from a bottle the distiller sent the guys when the show started and that has sat on the shelf about ten years since. The label reads: Warning, contains high levels of manliness. No age statement, and no, ten years in your house doesn't count. Whiskey only ages in the barrel. Small batch, four barleys, virgin charred American white oak. Not bourbon, not 51% corn. Made in the style of Scotch, right here in America.

Then the topic: the five precepts of the Church, Catechism 2041, page 548 if you've got the classic 90s edition. This is the Church flexing authority, which she rarely does. Most of what she does is defensive. Papal infallibility is a negative power, not a positive one. The precepts are different. They bind, and they're the floor, not the ceiling.

Attend Mass on Sundays and holy days, and rest from servile labor. Everybody knows the first half. The second half is the one that stings, because going out to eat after Mass means you're compelling somebody else to work. Nurses show up, gas stations stay open, and nobody needs to be demolished by guilt over a trip to the store. Don't be a Pharisee about it. Do take it seriously.

Confess your sins at least once a year, meaning your mortal sins. Go monthly anyway, and do a daily examination of conscience, because you can't remember what you ate two days ago, much less where you lost your temper 28 days ago. Dave prays to Our Lady on the way in: help me make this confession as if it were my last. Adam leaves his phone outside, because it's listening, and that's not a conspiracy. And if you deliberately hold a mortal sin back, the confession is invalid and you've just added to the pile. Compound interest is powerful. Compound sin is worse.

Receive the Eucharist at least during the Easter season. Observe the days of fasting and abstinence, which used to be far heavier, and nothing is stopping you from going heavier now. Adam has never once enjoyed fasting. Dave eats nothing until dinner and swears he thinks more clearly for it. Both of them fast every Wednesday with a group of men and offer it up for their wives and their families. That's the domestic priesthood doing what it's for.

And help provide for the needs of the Church. Notice it doesn't say if you can afford it. Money is the easy part. Time is the sacrifice, especially in the seasons of fatherhood when there isn't any. Fr. Brian O'Brien's answer when somebody says the church really ought to do this: "I totally agree. You should do it." Your kids need to see you make some of your time sacred, not because nothing else was asking for it, but because you told everything else no.

It all lands on stewardship. You don't owe God 10%. You owe Him 100%. The house, the money, the hours, and most of all the kids were never yours, and He's going to want all of it back. Adam is honest about where that gets hard: leaving work drained, walking in the door, wanting to shut down instead of engage. The fix isn't willpower. It's routine. A liturgy of the home. Because those minutes belong to Him too, and at judgment there won't be a single moment that goes unjudged.

One housekeeping note. The Camp Out is always the last weekend of September, so put it on the calendar now. Sign-ups open at the end of August, late on purpose, because opening early means people sign up and don't come, and space is limited. Patrons still come free. This year the guys will be asking for donations on site, because Patreon numbers are down and 100% of what comes in goes straight back into the show. Neither of them takes an income from it.

Protect what you were given. Provide more than the minimum. Establish a house that looks like the King is coming back for it. Raise your glass.

• Dave's summer vacation demoted from three months to two, with Fauci pleading the Fifth on the science
• Two weeks at a Michigan cabin, chopping firewood to replace what you burn, and a little aluminum fishing boat
• 15,000 miles on a brand new van because Oklahoma City is a multiple-times-a-week trip
• Three mopeds in 45 minutes in Arkansas, and the unconfirmed existence of a moped gang
• Reading Plato's Republic with the group at Deacon Harrison's, book 10, and Adam's threat to haunt them if he gets kicked out
• The new Odyssey movie reviewed: Juan in a dog onesie as Argos and Harrison Garlick arriving with his heart pre-filled with hate
• Why folding the lotus eaters into Calypso's island wrecks the most important choice in the story
• Whiskey of the week: Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, on the shelf ten years, "warning, contains high levels of manliness"
• Why an age statement stops the day it's bottled, because whiskey only ages in the barrel
• What makes Stranahan's American whiskey and not bourbon: four barleys, virgin charred American white oak, made in the style of Scotch
• Bringing back the old show warning, sporadically and without notice
• The five precepts of the Church, Catechism 2041, and why they're the floor and not the ceiling
• Papal infallibility as a negative, defensive power versus the precepts as the Church flexing positive authority
• Why the Church legislates as little as possible and prefers freedom from the law over obedience to it
• Resting from servile labor: the case against going out to eat after Mass, and why nurses and gas stations are fine
• St. John Chrysostom on why you cannot pray at home the way you pray in church
• Confessing mortal sins at least once a year, and why monthly confession is the better habit
• The daily examination of conscience as the thing that makes confession possible at all
• Dave's prayer to Our Lady walking into the confessional: make this confession as if it were my last
• Why Adam leaves his phone outside the confessional
• St. Alphonsus Liguori on concealing sin, and why an intentionally incomplete confession is invalid and grave matter
• The Easter duty and St. Thomas Aquinas on why the Eucharist completes what baptism begins
• Aquinas's threefold purpose of fasting, and why the second reason is the most interesting one
• St. Basil the Great: fasting as a weapon for the valiant and a gymnasium for athletes
• Fasting every Wednesday with a group of men and offering it up for your wife and family
• Providing for the needs of the Church with time, not just money, and Fr. Brian O'Brien's "you should do it"
• Why churches were built with a piazza out front, and what that says about community
• Stewardship: you don't owe God 10%, you owe Him 100%, and He wants your kids back
• "It's the King's house" as a reason to actually take care of what you have
• Coming home mentally exhausted and shutting down instead of engaging, and why routine beats willpower
• The liturgy of the home: building routines so a weak will has somewhere to fall
• Catholic Man Show Camp Out: always the last weekend of September, sign-ups open at the end of August

Books & Writings:

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2041 (the five precepts), page 548 in the classic 1990s edition
• The Republic by Plato (Dave's reading group, book 10)
• The Odyssey by Homer, and the new Christopher Nolan film adaptation
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Odysseus in the Inferno)
• Summa Theologiae, Second Part of the Second Part, by St. Thomas Aquinas (the threefold purpose of fasting)
• Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (free on the Amen app)
• True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort (free on the Amen app)
• Homily on Fasting by St. Basil the Great

Saints & Church Figures:

• St. John Chrysostom
• St. Alphonsus Liguori
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• St. Basil the Great
• St. Maria Faustina Kowalska
• St. Louis de Montfort
• Fr. Brian O'Brien

People:

• Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack)
• Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farm, Lady Pamela, Michigan cabin, Republic reading group)
• Deacon Harrison Garlick (reading group host, and a man who arrived at the Odyssey with his heart pre-filled with hate)
• Dr. Frank Grabowski
• Juan (Argos, in a dog onesie)
• Manny (made the short Camp Out documentary on the TCMS YouTube page)
• Lionel Richie (wrote a song that was clearly not about Catholic families)

Whiskey:

• Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, original flagship expression, small batch, blend of four barleys, aged in virgin charred American white oak

Community:

• The Catholic Man Show Camp Out, last weekend of September, sign-ups open end of August
• The Catholic Man Show Patreon (100% goes back into the show; patrons attend Camp Out free)
• The Catholic Man Show YouTube page (short Camp Out documentary, and the stitches video)

We had a guest walk in with gooey butter bars, so you already know it was a good night. Deacon Michael Halbrook is back, his fourth trip to Tulsa (one more and Dave's putting him in a green jacket), and Lady Pamela's baking came with him. Adam's oldest, Luke, was in studio too, which almost never happens, because mom was away and there were no rules. Luke's been out most nights hunting the raccoon that's been picking off the family chickens. No kill yet. But he knows what he's after now, and that's half the hunt.

This week's pour was fitting: Hazel Baker Kentucky Straight Bourbon, six years old, bottled-in-bond at 100 proof, family owned out of Louisville. It came from a barrel the dads at Father McGivney Catholic High School picked out in Kentucky. Full strength, real caramel, nothing watered down.

-------------------------------

This episode is brought to you by the Amen app from the Augustine Institute, the free app Adam's family uses to pray the Sunday readings on the way to Mass. No paywall, no subscription trap, just Scripture, prayer, and audiobooks like Divine Mercy in My Soul and True Devotion. And by Select International Tours, the group Adam and Dave trust for pilgrimages. Whether you want to lead one or join one, that's who you call.

-------------------------------

Then it got serious. Michael spent 18 years in corporate tech and walked away from it to build something for the Church. Not on a whim. He built it nights and weekends for years while the paycheck was still coming, took the business plan to his wife and sons like a board of directors, and only leapt when the runway made sense. But the moment that broke him open happened kneeling in the back pew before Mass. He asked our Lord for the certainty he could keep providing for his family, and he heard back, unmistakably: You've never been the one who provided. I've always been the one who provided.

That's the whole episode in one line.

Bishop Paprocki gave him the order of operations: pray for clarity first, then courage. Most men flip it and go charging into the dark. Michael talks through the discipline of saying no to good things so you can say yes to the right one, and then walks us through what he built, the &Altar app from Domus Formation. One reading, five minutes, a launch pad for your holy hour instead of a replacement for it. Pray, fast, give. A track for every season of life: the man, the woman, the family, the teen, the young adult, the elder.

The back half is fatherhood. Michael's second son, Matthew, is at Air Force basic training right now (pray for him), and Michael's living the Establish pillar in real time. Protect and Provide, most of us understand. Establishing a son (raising him to walk on his own, then actually letting him go) is the hard one. They get into the father wound, the men who never had an example to copy, and the way out: be a good husband first and the father will follow. Because the office of father never ends, and neither do your prayers for your kids.

Raise your glass.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Deacon Michael Halbrook's fourth visit, Lady Pamela's gooey butter bars, and Luke's ongoing raccoon hunt
• Hazel Baker Kentucky Straight Bourbon, a bottled-in-bond barrel pick from Father McGivney Catholic High School
• Leaving 18 years in corporate tech to build a ministry, without doing it recklessly
• Building the thing on nights and weekends while the secure paycheck was still coming
• Taking the business plan to your wife and kids and making them the board
• The back-pew moment: "You've never been the one who provided. I've always been the one who provided."
• Bishop Paprocki's rule: pray for clarity first, courage second, and why men flip the order
• Why success is more about saying no than saying yes, and the hundred failures you never see behind the one win
• Charlie Kirk's seven things and the discipline of a short list
• What the &Altar app actually is: five minutes to seed a holy hour, not to replace it
• Pray, fast, give, and tracks for the man, woman, family, teen, young adult, and elder
• Liturgical living: letting the Mass form the home instead of the other way around
• Matthew at Air Force basic training and learning to let a son go
• Protect, Provide, and the hard third pillar: Establish
• The father wound, and the men trying to be good dads with no example to copy
• Be a good husband first, and the father will follow
• Why the office of fatherhood, and your prayers for your children, never expire

Referenced in this episode:

• Deacon Michael Halbrook: permanent deacon, Diocese of Springfield in Illinois; founder of Domus Formation
• Domus Formation: https://wearedomus.com/
• &Altar app: https://andaltar.wearedomus.com/
• Bishop Thomas Paprocki, Diocese of Springfield in Illinois
• Bishop David Konderla, Diocese of Tulsa ("two moments in a Catholic's life: at Mass, and getting back to Mass")
• Hazel Baker Kentucky Straight Bourbon: bottled-in-bond, Louisville, KY
• Father McGivney Catholic High School barrel selection program
• Charlie Kirk, on the discipline of focusing on a short list
• Maria von Trapp, early writer on liturgical living
• Amen app (Augustine Institute): Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina; True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort