Catholic Boys – Perpetual Adoration

April 10, 2021

True Friendship and Mercy

When my three oldest daughters — Anna, Maria, and Laura — were teenagers, they got involved in community theater. In one of the first plays they participated in, they became good friends with one of the girls in the play. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call their friend “Julia.”

February 14, 2021

Love, A Criminal & Valentine’s Day

My first jury trial was in 1983, the same year that I started practicing law. I was the attorney for a young woman who had been charged in federal criminal court for embezzling money from a local bank. After that case, I continued to accept criminal defense cases for several years. In one of those cases, I represented a young man who was charged with a serious crime. The evidence against him was overwhelming, and he was found guilty of the crime. At the sentencing hearing, he told the judge that he had discovered God, and he was a changed man. The judge responded to his comment by stating,

January 16, 2021

A Tornado is at our Nation’s Doorstep

When I was growing up, it didn’t happen very often, but every time there was a tornado warning, my dad would go outside and look toward the horizon where the tornado was supposed to be coming from. He wanted to see with his own eyes whether a funnel cloud was coming toward our house. There were a couple of occasions when everyone in our family went downstairs and stayed in the basement until it was safe to come up.

January 9, 2021

Stupid People and Foul Language on Facebook

When I was 11 years old, every Friday my dad made me write a personal letter to a woman he hardly knew. The woman’s name was Miss Miller, and she was my sixth-grade teacher at St. Mark Catholic Grade School. I don’t remember if it was her idea or his idea. All I remember is that after she called him on the phone a few times to complain about my behavior in class, they developed a scheme in which I was forced to write the following letter on a blank sheet of paper every week:

December 26, 2020

A New Year’s Resolution That Can Transform Your Life

I want to share a concept and a technique that when fully embraced and implemented can significantly change the direction of your life and help you build the self-confidence and immunity to the criticism that you need to accomplish more for yourself and your family.

December 5, 2020

The Reflector Theory

When I was born (May 1957), my mom asked her 17-year-old brother, Dick LaHood, if he would be my godfather. My earliest memory of my Uncle Dick is from the early 1960s when he would pick up me and several of my brothers and sisters in his Cadillac and take us swimming at the Timber Lake Club.

October 3, 2020

How to Handle a Defiant Child

In last week’s article, The Defiant Catholic Child, I wrote that in every large devout Catholic family there is at least one child who is difficult to handle and demands more attention than the other children. In my article, I called this type of child “the defiant Catholic child” and limited my discussion to children who grow up in normal, devout Catholic two-parent homes.

September 26, 2020

The Defiant Catholic Child

I’ve written before about how I grew up in a family of 17 children — nine boys and eight girls — and how my wife and I raised seven children of our own. In every large family, there is at least one defiant child who is difficult to handle and demands more attention than the other children.

June 13, 2020

There’s No Such Thing As A Soul Mate

Do you know which five life events cause the most stress or upheaval in a person’s life? They are,