SPEAKER_02 0:06

Welcome to Catholic in America, a podcast in partnership with OSV News. I'm Jason Atkins. Does it really make sense to form and live in a household as a community of daily life with family and other close relations? Is the household even a natural community? Now, the answers to those questions as yes might seem obvious to some, but the profound unhappiness, psychological disorders, substance abuse, consumerism, and the commodification of human persons that's rampant in our culture suggests that not only is the question not being considered, but many, in fact, are responding with a resounding no. One leading thinker, Dr. John Kudabak, has written a new book about how and why we should answer yes to those questions. And in fact, he claims those are the most important practical questions of our age. His book is called The Intentional Household: Living As If People Matter. In the book, he provides eight principles for thinking about what an intentional household looks like and why it is the most fundamental building block to foster holiness and happiness. I love Dr. Cuddeback's work and I'm delighted that he's willing to join me for a conversation that I think gets to the root of why the church calls the family the first building block of society, the domestic church, and why Pope John Paul II said that the future of humanity runs by way of the family. Dr. John Cuddeback is professor of philosophy at Christendom College, where he has taught for 30 years. He lectures widely on topics including virtue, fatherhood, friendship, homesteading, and household, and his professional writings appear in all the academic journals and books that you'd expect. His first book, True Friendship, and his new book, The Intentional Household, are published by Ignatius Press and his podcast, blogging, and free courses at his organization and ministry, Lifecraft, are renowned for applying a timeless wisdom to life today. Dr. John Kudabek, welcome to Catholic in America. It's a blessing to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Jason, great to be with you.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

I was intrigued by this new book, very excited to have gone through it. The intentional household, living as if people matter, we'll unpack what do you mean by that? But tell me why, in a burgeoning genre of uh Catholic-related household management books, uh, what makes yours different? Why did you set out to write this book?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Well, I think given my position as a philosophy professor and as someone that is must have children, now grandchildren living on a homestead, there's a real combination in my life of thinking about and expressing with clarity principles and then how to implement them and be very concrete and particular. And so I've always had a great concern in the classroom to try to make principles as clear as possible. And I've and I've always also recognized that giving the kind of examples and applying it in particularly the very difficult times in which we live is an important aspect of helping people think about this. So I'd say it's kind of it has the philosophical punch with clarity and practical applications, bringing an ancient wisdom that's always new to bear on the very particular circumstances that we find ourselves in in these amazing times. I think that's what gives my work a particular encouraging and very useful practical flavor.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Why do we even need a book about the intentional household? It's almost like for most of human history, writing a book about the intentional household would have been about writing a book about telling people how to breathe. I mean, what's what's different about our age that necessitates a book like this?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Great question. And there's a number of approaches, but I but I would put it this way: the changes have been so dramatic that now we find ourselves where most of us have been fundamentally cut off from what was ordinary, but is no longer ordinary. So I like to say it's it's about rediscovering the ordinary. There's a deep wisdom written into the ordinary practices of the past, but now we need to rediscover it because of you know, there's so much we could say about how did this change happened. But right now, aside from how it happened, the bottom line is it has happened. Our homes and our home life have been eviscerated. We don't have those fundamental, amazing things like porch time, sitting around the fire, making meals together, lingering after the meal, talking into the evening, working together in the garden. These things that should have were so ordinary, so normal, such an important part of life. Now we recognize in a way that never before could have been recognized. Oh my goodness, if you take these things away, we've lost something foundational. So now we need a book because we need to be intentional in a way that we didn't need to be intentional before. We need an instructional manual, you might say. One of the things that's behind my writing the book, Jason, is I often say, it's I saw the bad and I saw the good. I saw the bad of the incredible challenges and problems and things that have been lost on the one hand. On the other hand, I see so many people whose human nature, not to mention grace, is at work in them. They recognize they want something different. They're looking for something different, but they're not sure where to find it. So that's what so spoke to me. Okay, they know they want something different. Well, it's it's it's there. And I've been blessed to be in a situation as a philosophy professor and living in an amazing family and community of having to try, you know, trial and error, you know, learning by mistakes, to kind of bring that together in such a way, using wonderful authors, using anecdotes from experience, I think I'm able to present something that people find really encouraging, nourishing, and direction giving.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

I think you you state it right up front early in the book. You ask the question does it really make sense to form and live in a household as a community of daily life with family and other close relations? And then you state this is the most important practical question of our age. Why do you think that's the case?

SPEAKER_00 7:14

You know, I'll I'll go to the to the deep, deep level. Because God made us to live in a home, we're called back to God's home to live there forever. And that is at the root of why home is so foundational in human life, informing us to know what it is to be human. And so if we're in an age where home life itself has been eviscerated, has has been rejected, has been set aside, has been maimed, then it's going to be the issue of our age that we've got to rediscover it. We've got to say this for everyone's sake, young, old, in between, this is what's going to fundamentally form us as persons, teach us who we are, give us the direction we need. So that's it's a question now we just have to ask.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

It's related to it seems happiness in the temporal order and holiness in the supernatural order.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Amen. And doesn't that make sense? Because holiness and happiness are really two sides of the same coin. They're ultimately the same, the same reality, just as Aristotle saw so clearly, to be virtuous is to be happy, happy in that rich sense of to be thriving. Similarly, we could we're really making that same point. One as Christians we say, to live in holiness is to live the fulfillment of our nature. But holiness is such a rich, fulsome thing. It it it's I think we we make a mistake when we reduce it down to just certain aspects of piety, as as though just forming in piety. No, there's it's it's we're made for relationship. And you are the law, the Lord says they'll know you by how you love one another. Well, the the the this has this has flesh, this has concrete form. Home is a key place that we love one another in those foundational relationships that are really the most defining, immediate, ongoing relationships in our life.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

You asked that, I'll state that question that this is the most practical important practical question of our age. Uh, does it make sense to form and live in a household? And then you say that's the question we need to ask individuals, couples, families, and nations. What specifically do we need to ask of each in that context? Individuals, couples, families, and nations. How to let's parse that out a little bit. What does that question look like for each of those groups?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Well, well, here's the thing, Jason. What strikes me when you ask that is some people might be thinking, all right, well, we'll look. I mean, aren't people still fundamentally opting for living in a household? Um, you know, it's not like they're going and you know, deciding, well, let's just live in dormitories with a hundred people. People still live in homes in some sense. This is true. But there's homes and there's homes. And and I think what we have to recognize is this community by God's design is so rich in a sense it's simple, but it's also very rich and complex. And we have to ask, are we willing to prioritize this over the things that we now are pushed by our societal customs, by what's going on around us in this culture that St. John Paul II called a culture of death. There's a lot of reasons to call it a culture of death. And one good reason to call it a culture of death is that it's turning us away from family and household. Family and household as really being a priority. Let me get more specific. This is a challenge, even for people that want to opt for marriage and home. We still have to recognize something that really has not been recognized. But more and more, especially people like me who deal with young people, are having to reckon every single day with, you know, why are these, why are these young people, even from very good families, suffering so dramatically in their kind of sense of, you know, isolation, loneliness, lack of connection. There's so many well-meaning parents who have this kind of overly frenetic lifestyle where they're finding it very difficult to connect in those rich key ways that are so necessary for having the kind of relationships between themselves as spouses and with their children that are at the foundation of life. So the come back to your question is are we really willing to make the effort to be intentional, to recognize there's a natural structure, there's a kind of natural plan for this of certain ordinary kinds of activities that need to be going on, that even in many good, well-intentioned families are not going on. And so are we willing to recalibrate and put first things first? And I often see this, particularly from a man's perspective. This can be very dramatic when we think about our career, how we're investing our time. There's very real concrete practical questions here that we need to reckon with.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

The question that you ask about is it a does it really make sense for us to form households? It goes to a perhaps even deeper question. Is the household a natural community? And that's we we might take that for granted, but that's certainly not something that we should take for granted. And something for which we might need to make the case. I think we're all, we all still live in a world where, as Rousseau said, man is free, but everywhere he is in chains. And for not an insignificant portion of the population, family life is a constraint on my freedom and my so-called autonomy. So we do, in fact, have to make the case that the household is a natural community worth forming, worth being present in, and worth prioritizing.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Amen. And Jason, then I I would go further. I think there's there's a a large number, let's just, these labels can be tricky, but I'm just gonna broadly to say more traditional or conservative people who are willing to make the choice for marriage. And this is beautiful, and this is very much to be commended. And and and what I want to do is I want to support that, but I want to kind of gently but firmly say, and that choice involves a bit more, perhaps, than we've realized, because so many of the structures of how we live together today are actually working against that choice. And so we need to go back to those ordinary kinds of activities. And I'm two main principles, as you know, deal with work and leisure. And so that that's where the kind of rubber meets the road. What kind of work are we doing in the home? What kind of leisure time and activities are we doing in the home? This is the flesh. This is this is the way that marriage and family actually needs to be enacted if it's really going to be what it's supposed to be. And so, in a sense, the book is a call to generally to those that are having a sense of yes, going in this direction seems to make sense. This, although I think it does actually make a case even to those who aren't seeing it yet. But for those who are seeing it, that's gonna say, okay, great. Now let's let's recognize through the whys in our tradition, this whole wonderful natural plan that has more details to it, that has more structure to it. It's gonna be really demanding, but it's gonna be astoundingly beautiful when we dig into it.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

To your point, there seems to be a reality that, you know, for some, the response, they're beautifully responding. I'm going to get married, I'm going to live in a committed marriage recognized by fidelity, I'm going to have be generous and have children. But maybe not bringing the level of intentionality to raising them in ways that are countercultural, for example, or bringing this intentionality into the household. You might even send your kid to Catholic school, but there's an expectation that the Catholic school is doing the one raising the child so much, but you're not letting techno, you know, principal. I'm looking at the eight principles in the book here, channel technology to the real good of the household. Are we being, uh are we succumbing to technology? Are we being intentional about it? So say a little bit about principle, you know, make household a priority. Principle number one, you've alluded to that. Principle number two, take responsibility. How do we do that in the context of family life in in particular? How do we channel technology? How do we enact real leisure? What does this look? What does this look like in practice?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Yeah. Well, um, a word about that responsibility. I to take responsibility for something is to see it as mine to do. And right now, let's talk about the fundamental model of a husband and wife. Anyone living in a household, and that's the vast, vast majority of us, whether in a married one or not, need to be thinking in terms of these principles. But it's it's easiest to look at it through the eyes of a couple. Both the husband and the wife, each in their own way, need to say, it is mine to make sure that we are crafting life here in a particular kind of way. But again, that that has to have flesh. And so when you say, well, what does it look like? Well, you raise the great issue of technology. I like to say, as regards technology, for us to be able to think clearly about how we're gonna handle it, how we're gonna limit it, when we're gonna use it, when we're gonna not, we need to have a clear vision of the positive form of life that we want to be crafting. And it's in view of that positive vision, then we know how to use or not use the technology. So that's where I like to go to those two key principles that I'd like to develop early on of the two fundamental forms of human life. Aristotle saw this clearly, enunciates it beautifully: the place of work and the place of leisure. Leisure is this very rich notion. Leisure is not the same as entertainment. It's related, it's related to entertainment, but but better, but more important. That in itself is one of the, you say specifically, it's gonna look like being countercultural in how are we gonna rediscover certain key forms of work that we've lost and recognize again what never had to be recognized before because it wasn't in question. This is one of the biggest aspects of this. In all prior generations, there had to be a certain kind of work going on in the vast majority of homes. Due to the various changes, many of them rooted in technology. We now can get by, in fact, most of us do, with very, very little work going on in the home. On the face of it, it might have seemed, oh, well, maybe this is good. Well, beforehand, maybe it might have looked that way. But now the results are in. Now we see, huh? It turns out God's natural plan was more astounding than we had ever realized before because we didn't, we didn't have anything to compare it to. Now we have something to compare it to. And we find ourselves in the almost funny situation, but very serious of, well, now I need to actually try to rediscover meaningful work that before we didn't have any choice, but now we need to be intentional and choose it, because this is the natural context for us to forge the kind of relationships that we're designed to have. This is a very beautiful Wendell Berry point that what husband and wife, they make a household together, just naturally speaking, that involves certain kinds of work. This is obviously of nature. It's a divine gift. But today, now we have to all go, oh, okay. Well then in this day, how are we gonna do that? What kinds of work are we gonna choose and prioritize for the sake of people? So that's one of the that's one of the key specific ways it's gonna look.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

You say household making is an art that manages things for the sake of persons. And in an old worldview, art was a virtue, the right way of making things. And that household making is actually an art that is exercised in accordance with virtue. So managing things for the sake of persons, say more about that for people. And it's part of your the subtitle of your book, Living as if people matter. So it's not just a matter of you know, making sure that everything's in is orderly in the home, but treating it as though living as though people matter. What is what what do you mean by that? Say more.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Thanks, thanks. I think this is this is a point that it's easy to miss, but it's actually a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece of God's design, it's a masterpiece of wisdom, it's a masterpiece of what uh brings out the true identity and vocation of the human person. Again, we're made for relationship. It's about living in the presence of persons. But how are we gonna actually enact that? We're not angels, we're embodied persons. So by this amazing design, it's going to be through using things that we develop the relationship as persons. But it's oh, there's always been this temptation, especially since the fall, there's this temptation to get caught up in the lower things, to get caught caught up in. You know, bodily pleasures, success, wealth, right? All which kind of go under the title of things. And we can pursue them. We all know this, if we're honest, we can pursue those things in a way that is contrary to the true good of persons, very much including our own. So I love the wisdom of Socrates. Wisdom is in living as though what's more important is more important. It's not just thinking that what's most important is most important, but it's living as though what's more important is more important. And so it's, it's, it's, it's simple to say it, but there's so many consequences to this. Every of our interactions and use of things, of anything in the realm of the material, of bodily wealth, is always for the sake of the higher things. We can say the spiritual goods for the sake of relationship. This is this is the principle that should be that gives form, that gives life to a household. This is why you can have so many households where there's so little material wealth, but there's still astounding beauty. There's beauty even in there being so little there. There's beauty in the character, there's beauty in the in the quality of their relationships. And so by seeing that order, we have that key insight that we're always going to take with us, even in the midst of great wealth, if we keep that principle in mind, we're going to put people as the reason for, as the measure of everything that we do, from growing vegetables to how we cook food, to how we arrange the furniture, to the pictures we hang on the wall, to the games that we play, the songs that we sing.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

It's not a home, it's a house or a residence hall where individuals sleep and have, you know, fleeting interactions with others who sleep in the same said house. But there's but fundamentally it's it's really a way station where people are out pursuing their individual pursuits and you know are supported in various ways by parents or things like that, by each other. And there is our means of material support to be sure, but fundamentally it's a place where people sleep and not the vision, the relational dimension that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

And I and I and I think that's one of the ways that the the book is a is is a gentle but firm call to look again, to look at our households and to ask, are we crafting everything there in view of the highest things? In in view of ultimately the supernatural, but even on the natural level, the calling to grow in virtue, to grow in friendship, to grow in character, to grow in the ability to live a deeply meaningful life together in the home. And again, as embodied beings, this takes on very concrete form that you know it is particularly seen. I emphasize this, as you know, in the younger people in our life and the older people in our life. And that again is an aspect of in so many ways, our homes have become not such a friendly place for the very young and for the very old. And that says so much, and there's such a beautiful, but but let's not let's not self flagellate. It's not about guilt, it's about turning and seeing a better path and saying, yes, we can do that. And in fact, by the great in the spirit of Spe C.S. Lewis in Narnia, there's a deeper magic. There's a beautiful deep magic of when we prioritize with generosity the children, when we prioritize the weak, the elderly, we discover ourselves. And everyone in the intervening ages has this kind of fullness of life in this shared presence and generosity across generations in the daily life of the home.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

One of the things that you see in pushes for things like legalization of assisted suicide is that people don't want to be a burden on their relatives. And so you miss this multi-generational living. It's contrary to the types of things that you're discussing where we're living in solidarity with the elderly, but we really want to be a burden to each other. We want to serve and love and embrace this relationality among different generations. How is this intergenerational, multi-generational vision an antidote to what may ails a lot of modern culture?

SPEAKER_00 27:13

I I that's a great way of putting it because it really does take us back to what is most important? What are our priorities? Are we living as if people in their real flourishing is what really matters. I love to say that the home is the natural place to be born, to live and to die. And looking at it especially then through the eyes of the elderly, you can tell so much about our age by how we treat the elderly. And look, obviously, you know that this is complex. It it might not be this is not just a we have to do it the way they did in the old days. You can't ever put someone in a nursing home. Sometimes someone has to be in a nursing home due to the fact that they're living longer in such a way that their bodily needs simply can't be taken, right? We we have to recognize that. We have to apply these principles in the age in which we are. But that said, that our fundamental approach would be always to be asking: are we doing all that we reasonably can to remain in the presence of our elders, of our elderly, in recognizing an astounding plan? No one could have come up with this plan. It is so of divine origin that the very needs that the elderly have for us to take care of them are both our gift to them and their gift to us. Because, and this is always the way it is in the divine order, we always find it's better than we realize. This richness that comes out that we wouldn't have discovered until we do it, they have so much to give. If if life is about the higher things, this is why the ancients saw this, they venerated the elderly because they tended to associate them with more progress on the path to wisdom. And so the elderly should be more in a position to pass on their wisdom to us. Here we take care more and more of their bodily needs, but they are there to guide us and to be with us and to give us counsel, to give us consolation. There's so much beauty in each new stage that, again, it's it's about rediscovering a beautiful, if challenging, plan that's simply so much better than what we've opted for.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

We live today so often as though children and the elderly are burdens on my path to fulfillment. Um, but yet it seems that the ancients, and you use the you hearken back to the ancients quite a bit in the book and quote many ancient philosophers and thinkers. What is it that even in a pre-Christian world, people seem to have understood to 2,500 years ago that they don't understand? We seem to have lost today. We seem, you know, where we live every year, every age is getting better, smarter, more progressive, more enlightened, right? That's the that's the thing with so many. But yet the ancients, 2,500 years ago, understood things that we seem to have lost. What did they understand, even without the light of Christ, um, that we see can't seem to get our head around today?

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Well, and in great question. And in in in fairness, as it were, um, we don't want to make it sound as though all the ancients did. Right. I mean, there is this beautiful this beautiful aspect of, I believe it's St. Justin Martyr, who refers to how this is a beautiful gift of divine providence that there was, especially in Athens, there were these Greeks that came to have a great insight into human nature. And I think it's it's fair to say, in God's providence, there were those, and it wasn't just there. I mean, it's amazing when sometimes what can be seen by in certain ancient Chinese philosophy also about what it is to be human, about the good life. Now, often there's a real admixture of error. It's not, we're not going to pretend here that you know somehow they saw it all, but I think it's a great gift of God's providence to show us that how he, there are these two lights, right? There's the light of divine revelation and of faith, and there's the light of reason. God intended by the light of reason that we be able to see certain things about what it is to be human. And the reality is, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they did see so much about the true flourishing of human nature in virtue, in relationship, in friendship, and the nature and beauty of community and the common good that can be achieved there. And so it's not as though we're saying they can teach us everything, but it's sometimes it is very important, I think, that the church has always seen this. There's a special kind of encouragement that comes and a certain enrichment. Wow, by the light of reason, they saw this. That shows us something in a unique way about who we are. And I think this is particularly important today, where we need this to kind of give the other side to, well, we're always getting more wise. We have so much more insight. No, in certain key ways, certain key ways about what human flourishing is and the nature of the household, the nature of friendship, the nature of family life actually was was seen. And not perfectly, not perfectly, but key things were seen there by them. And by and that was a kind of that's a kind of foundation that is then further perfected and at times corrected by divine revelation. And so it it's just part of the beauty of our inheritance that we can get a kind of affirmation from that side too.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

Yeah, I should have been clear. The the ancients did all kind of the Roman Roman society was barbaric, truly, truly barbaric uh by today's standards. But yet, as you said, they're thinking about the household, the importance of friendship, the importance of virtue speaks very interestingly to a lot of these questions. And we have a modern-day Horace, uh, Wendell Berry, one might say, um, and you quote liberally from him in the book as well. And he says, Households that can create their own leisure are not slaves to mass entertainment. And I'm paraphrasing there a little bit, but say a little bit more about one of the important principles in this book, which is to enact real leisure in the home. Uh again, avoiding this reality that we're simply um on our devices, living in a certain place and sleeping in a certain place, but ultimately we pursue our own entertainment and consume entertainment and different in our own leisure the way we choose to do so. That leisure really is something that it fundamentally is relational as well.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Well, there's so there's so much there. And and and I I try to use both the great wisdom of Aristotle on what leisure means in any case, and the sense of activities that more have their meaning from within and and has this have a kind of contemplative richness to it. And again, this is this was something that tended to be ordinary and more built into things like the porch time, sitting outside and looking at the stars, activities that didn't have a utility to them, but were just rich ways of kind of being together and resting together in higher things. That's a great expression of what leisure in the true, fuller sense is. And that's something that particularly as Christians, we're called to do on Sunday, but then in certain ways have that have that flow over to the rest of the week, too. And and so I think part of being intentional here is rediscovering certain ordinary ways of being together in richer kind of ways. Very often an important enabling aspect of that is going to be to disable certain technological things, which even if they have their uses at other times, are gonna tend to get in the way of that kind of real presence, recollection, being together in these deeper ways. That's one of the main ways that a household today is going to reconnect with one another, reconnect with God's plan for that fuller kind of life. And in the beautiful Wendell Berry point is you don't need an entertainment industry to do that. You don't have to go over to be receiving things that are by other people's principles, right? That's that's a mistake. That's a mistake to think, oh, but we've gotten habituated to that, to thinking, oh, and and it's it's it's very tempting. This is why we're gonna have to be intentional. There's something richer if we're willing to do a deeper cultivation and rediscover something simple, but oh, so rich and profound.

SPEAKER_02 36:28

To the point about uh technology, when I do interviews or have conversations or talk about things like this, you know, the objection is, well, you're talking to a homesteading philosopher, or, you know, how practical is this? Oh, he's asking us to all be Amish. But you're saying, you know, principle five, channel technology to the real good of the household. You're not anti-technology, but it has to be channeled towards some good. How might we do that today? How might we think about technology appropriately and how it can be used to cultivate relationship and true leisure in the home?

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Well, maybe examples of the best. I love how G.K. Chesterton once said, sometimes we have to use technology to overcome the problems that technology caused. And one of the problems that technology caused is it kind of removed work from the home. And it has brought about that we tend to lost a number of skills that we used to have. Wendellberry actually uses this example. It might sound simple, but I'm gonna see in my own life. Um having a really good chainsaw is something that enables me to be able to then do something very rich and natural. I actually split wood by hand and heat my house by wood, but this becomes capable, I become that becomes possible for me because I have a no pun intended cutting-edge chainsaw that I use in order to kind of set that up. And I'm just saying, take that as a little example of we're not against advanced technologies, we judge them in view of are they serving the good work and the rich leisure that we want to have in our home? And so there's so many other examples. Do we we we're in it, we're we're we're recording this via very high technology. We're using it for a very good end. It's very important that we be able to recognize at times we utilize that for a very good end, but we never lose sight of the uh a rich notion of the deeper good that we're trying to preserve. And that's for instance going to keep us from trying to live our life in a Zoom room, live our life online. We go online to be enriched in certain key ways that perhaps before we wouldn't have had, obviously, we wouldn't have had to go online, but now we might have to. So we do that, and then we take that back to the richness of the other aspects of our life. And and so again, we we have to be savvy, we have to be willing to take in the big picture, have a clear view of the deeper richness that we're looking for, and use or not use technologies, limit them, put them in their place, all in view of the specific richness that we're seeking.

SPEAKER_02 39:37

You don't address this in the book, but I think it's an important point that so much today of what we consider leisure is actually leaving the home. And I'm thinking travel, for example, the obsession with travel, and I'm guilty as the next person. I love to travel and see new things and experience new places. But at the same time, we identify leisure with leaving the home and doing nothing. Whereas you're proposing that leisure is actually and best thought of is in the home in relation to others. And sometimes the things are useful in the worldly sense, but sometimes there's just looking at the stars and reflecting in wonder as well. Say a little bit about the whole obsession with leaving the home to pursue one's leisure.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Yeah, you know, we I think that goes hand in hand with by and large, we tend to leave the home to pursue work also. And in and and this is important. We have to use our reason well, we have to be savvy. And you know this in asking the question. This is why you're raising it. There's nothing wrong with leaving the home to go do certain real leisure out there, right? And it might be that we take our family on a pilgrimage to Chart in France, and we experience a whole beautiful cultural richness there and and and have a deep experience of leisure as it were out there. Right in in a similar way, there's very important work that needs to be done outside the home. And I know what you want to imply. Oh, what why are people going and working outside the home, particularly living in the day in which we do? Most of us are going to have to have our key work that supports the family, supports the household outside the home. But but the point here is to keep things in perspective, to recognize that home remains, household home remains the fundamental home of the most, I'd say, foundational primordial instances of work. It's where people first learn how to work. And families in ongoing ways have have this kind of main key expression of work in their lives. That too much has been left behind. Same thing about leisure. We by leaning into it, we're not in any way saying there isn't any leisure outside the home. But but to but too often there are, I like to say, there's so many centrifugal forces, you know, literally meaning forces fleeing the center, take the center of being the home away from it. And we, if we're gonna be intentional, we have to specifically now ask ourselves, okay, what are we gonna do to kind of do the institute more centripetal, going towards the center forces? And so sometimes we might say, well, you know, we're just gonna stay at home. We're gonna lean into this time, these ways of being together. And the more we do that, I think the more we're gonna discover an amazing new rich element in our life that many of us have been missing.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

For many reasons, people have to move and uproot and go to other places and create new households and new places. Sometimes that's out of necessity, sometimes out of that's out of choice to pursue a new career opportunity or advance the latter or do sorts of things or make a better income. But at the same time, though, it it creates difficulties. What is the importance and or how important in your mind is stability in terms of place? Um, is can the household be certainly because it's built on relationship, as you're saying, moving is not an absolute impediment to creating the type of household you're talking about. But if we're talking about multi-generational solidarity, for example, uprooting away from family can create practical difficulty. So, how important, in your view, is stability of place and being intentional about staying put in a particular geographic location or even more specifically in a particular home?

SPEAKER_00 43:45

This is a particularly thorny question today, Jason. And and we have to we have to talk about it. We have to think about this, we have to pray about it. And we always have to go back to our principles. And then the great virtue of prudence, particularly the great virtue of domestic prudence or household prudence. That in a marriage is a key thing that spouses work on together. We have to use those universal principles, then we have to apply them in our concrete circumstances. There is an intrinsic good of stability. There's an intrinsic good of connection to place and your neighbors. Wendell Barry brings this out beautifully. We need to see that. We need to recognize that. Now, taking that for what it is, recognizing it for what it is, we might look, people ask about this all the time. It's so important. Particularly, I here's a classic one. Well, I want to, I'm thinking I want to move to my family to the country to have a more healthy environment where we're going to be have better able to, you know, more in touch with the earth, nature, have have good work, have this homestead, but that means leaving parents and grandparents behind in a certain community over here. These are conflicting goods. There's no easy answer to that question. I say to people, you have to weigh that very, very carefully because connection with the other generation and with good school, with a community is very, very important. It is important to recognize that we can have a certain kind of household, and even I like to say, a kind of homestead anywhere. You can do that in a suburb, you can do that in an urban situation. So the principle here is not, well, flee to the country. Now, a number of people are doing that in view of these principles. But we have to, we have to bear in mind these various goods. There is a good to stability, connection to place. But in view of the very things that we're talking about here, people might discern, you know, I need to go to a better place where it's going to be more congenial for me to try to do these things and maybe have more neighbors or perish or community that are thinking in these terms. So we're going to go and we're going to start again there and we're going to be as stable as we can there. And and this is part of living in the age in which we are. If our work necessarily takes us to a new place, then we're going to go and we're going to we're going to be, as it were, as stable, as connected as we can be, and we're going to recognize that that's a challenge that we are going to have to face. I always love to say at least seeing the challenge, seeing the trouble, seeing the downside is 50% of addressing it, because then we can at least live in the truth of, hmm, this is going to be hard. What are we going to do about it?

SPEAKER_02 46:36

I think a lot of the questions and issues that we've discussed about the how, and you take a great pains in the book to talk about how we can build the intentional household, which I think is beautiful, but you start rightly with some of the antecedent principles, which is, you know, first of all, make it a priority and take responsibility. That's the type of conversion that we need. But then you build it really on friendship. And I think this is the key, is and starting with friendship and marriage, and then building that relationality and that friendship, making a house a place of hospitality, building that community of life and love in the household. So we can talk about technology, we can talk about leisure, but if it's not built on the friendship, especially of a man and a woman in marriage, it's it's not going to be as fruitful as it could be. So let's let's go back to basics here and talk about the importance, first of all, of friendship in the home, but especially friendship between the spouses and the fruits that that generates.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

I love it. And again, we're talking about human friendship here. We're talking about not friendship between angels, but friendship between human persons in bodies. It is always a very beautiful, uh concrete, embodied thing. Marriage is has a great richness to it. It's malleable. Our marriage can flourish, just like we were talking about, in in very diverse situations. But nonetheless, I love this line from Wendell Berry. Living things call for a conducive context to flourish. If you want the plants in your garden to do well, you do all you can to give it a conducive context. The most natural conducive context for a marriage to flourish is precisely in making a kind of household that we're talking about. And we need to recognize too many people don't have a picture for this. They get married kind of wanting to share so much, but then they find, well, but you're over here doing your thing, and I'm over here doing my thing. To some extent, we might have to reckon with that in the day in which age in which we live, but we need to recognize that this Wendell Berry really opened my eyes on this. He said, one of the main problems of marriage today is that it's natural context of making a household, of homemaking, the both of them together has been removed. So at the end of the day, what are they actually doing together? And another aspect of this, I like to put it this way. Well, then people from traditional families might say, and there's of course a very important truth, what we're doing together is raising our children. But but I'm I'm gonna push a little bit. Raising children is not a standalone activity. You don't get up in the morning and make your list of what are you gonna do today. Well, today I'm gonna raise my child. Raising children is done in specific kinds of activities. And and the suggestion here is it's precisely the work and leisure of a traditional household that is the conducive context for raising children. So when we say, what are we going to do together as spouses? It needs to have flesh. It needs to be very grounded in the earth and in these beautiful bodily daily things. And so that is when you say the friendship of spouses, I go very concrete, very practical. What are what how are we arranging home life to intersect as much as possible with one another and with the children, with the children as individuals, speaking into their life, hearing them, having the meal time where we are with them individually? This is so easy to miss, even among those that know conceptually how important these relationships are, they have to be hammered out daily in concrete ways. Otherwise, what do we have?

SPEAKER_02 50:56

That point you make about raising children and isolating that uh really resonates in the sense that so often we're raising children to be independent actors. So we're cultivating their powers primarily through education and character formation in an instructional, verbal sort of way in many instances, and not uh let immersing them in a healthy culture, that conducive environment or that cursive conducive conduit to form those sorts of things. So that really speaks to me, um, and I think is a super important point because we're working so hard as parents, but we're training them to live in a world that A might be fading away on some level, and B, we're training them to be independent is often the words that we look for, and self-reliant, but that's actually the opposite of the happiness and the holiness in many instances that are cultivated in the household that you're describing.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Right. Or the or the or the deeper kind of self-reliance that comes from these more traditional ways of a self-reliance in working together in responsible ways. So many young men feel incompetent, incapable. They've spent so much time in their academic studies, but but they haven't been in more real contexts where they've been given responsibility, given responsibility for people in the kind of work that directly serves people. We're missing that richer sense of education. A whole nother, not a whole nother related topic. We're over-academicized, I think, when we think about the education of our children. Hey, I'm an academic, I'm all for academics. There's the deeper prior education that even well-intentioned people are missing. And that's what comes naturally when we are intentional about this kind of household.

SPEAKER_02 52:50

I always say that the smartest people I know were those who had parents who owned small businesses or who grew up on farms. And I think it's precisely because they lived the reality of this deep relational family life, because they were the ones getting involved and helping their parents in those businesses or working on those farms. And it started firing synapses in their brain that has made them incredibly functional, thoughtful, hardworking, and good people, also at a friendship level and a relational level, too. So that's an important point. Now, some people might be getting overwhelmed, thinking, oh, oh no, here's one more thing I gotta do. I've got to build the intentional household. What's the word of encouragement or wisdom? And maybe you want to say a little bit about your work with lifecraft as well in that regard.

SPEAKER_00 53:35

Well, thanks for asking. I I mean, honestly, that maybe this is a little bit overused today, but this is this is the moment to use it. We were made for this. We really were. We can do this by the grace of God. Courage is one of the cardinal virtues. I mean, it's the hinge virtue because the human good is a great one. It's an arduous one. It is going to take work, it has to be crafted. But but my word of encouragement, this isn't just one more thing. This is the big picture. And it's incredibly beautiful. And God doesn't call us to anything that He's not giving us the grace to do. We don't have to do it exactly by the book. We don't have it, it might not look like the success that we'd like it to look for, as Mother Teresa so importantly said. We're not called to be successful, we're called to be faithful. We need to, we need to realize these truths. We need to set our sights on it. Thanks for asking about lifecraft. The whole point of lifecraft is to bring the principles, these these life-giving principles, these encouraging principles that call to our nature. Oh my goodness, yes, this is the beauty for which our I was made. These are the important things. These are what really matter. And so, and and so at the at the website, I uh life dashcrafts.org, there's there's there's there's videos. My wife and I have a podcast. It's uh there's some free courses. It's just it's all about trying to bring a certain wisdom that's been passed on that I've been blessed to be plugged into as a philosophy professor, and that I want to bring to others because it is ours, but it's been overshadowed. It's been set aside, and it needs to be reconnected in a very concrete way with our daily life because now is the time. This is where this is the age of the family. This is where we've gone back to the root of God's plan that was the root of everything else for the beginning, for the end, and the in-between of life. And and and so that this this book is really kind of a life work. Hopefully, people will find great encouragement and great nourishment of God's plan, it's always better than we've realized. And it's always possible. There's others that are trying to do this too.

SPEAKER_02 56:02

That's a clarity and call. We'll put a link to Lifecraft in the show page, but where can they go to learn more about Lifecraft and some of the practical suggestions and guidance that you have, even beyond this book?

SPEAKER_00 56:12

Yeah, thank you. It's it's at life-craft.org.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

Wonderful. The book is the intentional household, living as if people matter. The author is Dr. John Cuddeback. This was great. I we could have spent another couple hours together. I'm so grateful for your time, though, and for joining us on Catholic in America. Thanks so much, and God bless your work.

SPEAKER_00 56:32

And thank you, Jason. It's great to be with you. I really appreciate it. Take care.

SPEAKER_02 56:37

As I discussed with Dr. Cuddeback, so many of our problems at the individual and social level, it seems, stem from home lives that are neither not faithful nor are they intentional. By faithful, I mean households ordered toward God and built on friendship with Him and friendship between the spouses. True friendship, as Aristotle notes, is walking together towards some common good, in this case, the rearing of children. These are the building blocks of the intentional household. And that is broadened by the multi-general generational solidarity that Dr. Cuddeback notes is one cornerstone of the intentional household. How are we caring for our elderly rather than just warehousing them? What can we learn from the wisdom of our elders? How can they benefit from us? And how can we be a gift to them? Even beyond the faithful marriage, we must be intentional, as it is difficult to swim upstream in the culture today without that intentionality. And that is where I think this book is especially helpful. For example, Dr. Cudaback asks, how can we rightly order our use of technology in the home? How can we most joyfully and prudently use our leisure as true re-creation? And how can we find ways to create good work in the home that the family can do together to build solidarity, deeper bonds of love and friendship? This book by Dr. Cuddeback has given me much to chew on, and I hope it does for you as well. I'm glad that his ministry, Lifecraft, helps people put these eight principles from the book into action. And I hope listeners will look into that as well, and we'll link it on the show page. Thank you for listening to this episode of Catholic in America. My aim is always to educate, edify, and encourage you as you seek to be a faithful disciple in your corner of the vineyard and in the mission field of the United States of America. Thanks for sharing your precious time to join me in that conversation. Pray for me as I pray for thee. God bless you. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 58:39

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