The Little Friar

Courtney DeFeo's new In This House We Will Giggle:  Making Virtues, Love & Laughter a Daily Part of Your Family Life  is a real gem.  It's a wildly practical book filled with parenting wisdom for forming and transforming the character of our children in explicitly Christian ways.  DeFeo writes:  "I'm convinced we can let loose and enjoy our family even as we're teaching profound principles for life" (p. 6).  And that conviction pervades throughout the book.  She deals with twelve different virtues in each of the chapters:  Joy, Love, Forgiveness, Faith, Patience, Perseverance, Respect, Responsibility, Service, Humility, Gratitude, and Generosity.  Each chapter concludes with particular helps for parents that cover each of these virtues.  I often struggle to provide advice for parents that is age-appropriate.  But DeFeo cuts to the core, and offers joyful and loving wisdom that respects children as children.   It's an easy b...

Johann Christoph Arnold poses some pointed questions about the hows and whys of raising children in our culture in his Their Name is Today:  Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World  (Plough 2014). In Their Name is Today , Arnold, a pastor of the Bunderhof, writes with a pointed prophetic voice and a pastoral heart to challenge the way we educate and raise our children.  He  reviews sweeping changes in the way our society treats children.  But he also highlights the stories of dedicated parents and educators who are finding creative ways to give children the time and space they need to grow.   The book takes its title from a Nobel Laureate's, Gabriela Mistral, poem that appears in the first pages:  "Many things can wait.  Children cannot ... Their name is today".  And the book highlights so many of our children's challenges today:  Technology, standardized testing, overstimulation, academic pressure, marketing to children, over-diagn...

Tonight, a female friend was lamenting the fact that her eldest son, now approaching 10, had learnt about sexual intercourse at school.  As a family, the mother and father had hoped to wait until their son's 10th birthday to have "the talk".  Now, she's overwhelmed and wasn't sure what to do.  So I thought:   Why not set out a little pastoral advice, and keep it practical, that might benefit every parent?   What follows are some sketches, and just that, of things I think parents need to know.  And I'll close out with some book ideas.  1.  If you're afraid of having "the talk", you're not alone.  Most parents don't have the tools or language to talk to their children about these matters and they are looking for help.  Consider this one of the places you might turn.  The problem, though, is that most of us -- like my friend -- push off having this "talk".  In that way, we only bolster our culture's insistence that sex is so im...

Kate Conner's Enough:  10 Things We Should Be Telling Teenage Girls  is a book I wish I'd written years ago.  It contains a pastoral wisdom that will guide parents -- and the whole Church -- to care for our teenage daughters.  My wife and I do not have children.  But a good deal of our respective ministries -- hers in residential care and mine in classrooms and congregations -- demand we're familiar with the sorts of wisdom Conner shares here.   Enough  is by an author already known for her work in churches, for her  writing in a  blog  for years, where the kernel of this book first appeared.  Her 2012 post , " 10 Things I Want to Tell Teenage Girls " , got a million views in just a week.  I shared it in my Facebook feed at the time.   This book is addressed to adults.  There's a companion for teens, 10 Things for Teen Girls:  You are Beautiful. You are Valuable. You are Enough .  But in Enough  she bre...

In the tradition of their 2008 Love Dare , Stephen and Alex Kendrick offer a 40 day series of meditations in The Love Dare for Parents  that are uniquely devoted to practices that promote Christian love between parents and children.  As a pastor, one of the special gifts and vocational joys of serving the church are our children.  Having the heart of God for the church's children, teaching and modeling the skills, practices and goals of sacred parenting is something I'm often called upon for wisdom and advice.   The Love Dare for Parents  is a good place for parents to begin.  The meditations are based around Malachi 4.6a:  "(God)  will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents".  As a pastor, this encapsulates precisely what it means when I think of having God's heart for our children.  Whether our relationships need repairing; whether our children are in preschool or college -- th...

It's Mothers' Day weekend.  We typically, as we want to do in our culture, strip this holy-day of its genuine power to transform our lives.  We turn it into flowers and trinkets.  When it's supposed to be a time for peace-making:  Every victim of violence is some mother's child. So I'm tempted to write in that direction.  Instead, I want to offer an extended quote from Bonhoeffer's Life Together .  The quote itself isn't about mothering.  But I know of no better theological advice for mothers (and fathers and children).  So I offer it here.  What does this quote mean in the context of your mothering? " Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them.  As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself.  " This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my ...

Last night, Kendra and I began exploring attending a different church in the area.  Another friend also asked that she and her kids join that journey as fellow companions.  So one of the first questions asked was about children and communion:  Specifically, could they take? Now, they've been baptized.  But not confirmed.  Parenting is shared between mother and father, but they're divorced.  So what's the decorum in admitting children into the church's (read, adult ) worship? Let me begin by saying, I'm very, very, very supportive of parents who bring their children to worship.  And I think the Church catholic is too.  We have lots of folks who invest, every Sunday, in the nurture, care and support of children.  So I praise the Sunday school teachers.  I salute the children's pastors.  I love all those who know how to tell a good story and sing good songs with our children.  I wish them all  well.  I'm even hugely supp...

In thinking over a recent question asked of me as part of an interview -- about why working with abused and neglected children was something I want to do and/or should do, I've thought about my response. Those of us who've worked with children, know about cycles of victimhood and violence , how victims often create more victims. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how abused children grow up into damaged adults who become perpetrators themselves.  Abuse -- emotional, sexual, and physical -- tends to have a generational character.  The sins of the father are tragically visited upon the children, generation after generation. In Mark 9.33 to 10.31 there is a teaching sequence of Jesus' that centers a great deal upon children.  When the disciples ask "Who is the greatest?" Jesus answers this way: Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all." He took a little ...

I'm beginning to see calls to petition for a return of school prayer.  I think that's the wrong direction for us to go.  Here's why. I was a Lady Gaga fan from the very beginning.  This is my favorite song: I've worked with kids like these in the parish -- as have many of my readers.  "The bad kids."  These kids are social and moral "monsters".  But Gaga deconstructs the label "bad kid" in the song.  These kids are moral monsters not because they are intrinsically evil but because "they don't know right from wrong".  What's more, while on the outside these kids are an objective pain in the ass (that's my professional clinical diagnosis), inside their "heart is pure".  Their deviance is due to more to insecurity ("don't be insecure") than depravity. In short, in this song Gaga is trying to get on the inside of these "monsters", to speak to their brokenness, sadness, lonel...