The Catholic Man Show

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.
TOPICS COVERED
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...

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.
TOPICS COVERED
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...

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.
TOPICS COVERED
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

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.
TOPICS COVERED
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...

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.