Some of you may like my latest Good Letters post. Here’s an excerpt: This quiet slaughter is perhaps the greatest perversion wrought by the devil after the fall. The most innocent among God’s most favored creation, cut down by a world in turmoil and rebellion, often by the hands of those who ought rightly be …
The difference between being blessed and being spared Read More »
Because I am a father I think about the parents of that boy torn to pieces, of his sister whose leg was taken. I think about those parents in Newtown, whose biggest Christmas purchases were coffins for their sons and daughters. I think on the parents of the killers, too, and sometimes I am afraid, …
I guess I stopped writing about personal things here because I didn’t like the person I had become. I felt stupid, the faith and family writer who gets divorced. This was compounded by coming to DC and finding myself—though alongside very decent and honorable people—exposed as well to a few ugly people for whom gossip …
Some of you might like my meditation on what Good Friday means to the parent of a dead child. Here’s an excerpt: “It is a great mystery to me, how God can know what it means to be forsaken, and because he is three-in-one, know also how it is to look on your dying child, …
There is nothing to be done but weep. Cry out for the children with bodies shattered, for the ones covered in blood not their own, for the ones who didn’t die instantly. Cry out for those who fell protecting them. Cry out for the parents in their waiting. Cry out for sisters and brothers. Cry …
The intellectual consensus seems to be that having children is miserable business. This consensus is built on shoddy thinking and shoddier statistics. The latest example is brought to us by Why Have Kids? author Jessica Valenti, who notes that in the wake of Nebraska’s “safe haven” law allowing parents and caregivers to abandon children without prosecution, …
The last fortnight was chicken pox time for the Woodlief boys. I have acquaintances who are apostles of all things scientific and modern, and who are therefore appalled that my boys never received the chicken pox vaccine. It seemed like a good decision at the time, given that the vaccine wears off by the time …
Some of you may like my latest essay at Image Journal’s section of Patheos, “Coming Home to Fatherhood.” Here’s an excerpt: “Or perhaps it’s closer to truth to say that nearly everything we do, so long as we love our children, keeps us moving closer to the full heart-knittedness that we yearn for with anyone …
Yesterday was Stephen Caleb’s birthday. He’s twelve, and there are now only 364 days between him and the onset of teenagerism, which I associate — at least among American kids — with sloth and self-indulgence, ignorance and idiocy and all-around brain malfunction, the latter now being scientifically proven at last. We are all of us …
When we don’t think we can control some things we take charge of what we can. This is why the functionary fastidiously maintains a constant distance between his stapler and his tape dispenser, and why the abused child has a ritual for pajamas and tooth-brushing and curling up tight that he enacts like the body’s …
I realized this morning that part of the reason I haven’t written here in so long, the reason I balk at the thought of it, is that I got the most hate-filled letter I’ve ever received, back in July, in the form of a comment someone tried to post here. The writer claimed I was …
There’s certainly no distinction to breeding, and so Father’s Day must be intended to celebrate something other than one’s ability to procreate. It began in tragedy, which is maybe the truth of too many things, the world’s way of daring us to bring beauty from ashes. Two hundred and ten fathers erased from their homes, …
Yesterday it was just me and my three year-old, Isaiah John. We were cruising down the road in my truck, past bars and tattoo parlors. Yes, there are tattoo parlors in Wichita. The sun was out, the wind was blowing, and we didn’t have anywhere to be for a couple of hours. It’s times like …
Someone told me recently, “You’re a good man, Tony.” This made me think of a James Taylor concert I heard about once. In the hush between sets, someone in the audience shouted, “I love you, James!” Taylor stepped to the microphone and replied, “That’s because you don’t know me.” Do you ever feel some days that …
I didn’t mean to be gone this long; the hours piled up into days and then weeks, and once again I was a negligent blogger. Sometimes I think there should be a social services hotline for blogs, to have them removed from the homes of people like me. I’m talking about people who let our …
I don’t know the first thing about how to be a father to a fifteen year-old girl. Today is her birthday and if she had lived I would be puzzling this out, what I think about clothes and boys and music and especially boys, because all my babies are beautiful and perhaps Caroline most of …
Sometimes I am overwhelmed, as I stand with my sons in the cathedral, by the feeling of safety. It’s not something I ever felt in church as a child. In those days I felt out of place. I thought I was pitied or judged because my parents weren’t there. I felt condemned by an angry …
My first thought, upon hearing of Amy Chua’s now famous (or infamous) essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers, is that it’s irrelevant to me. The odds that I will go out and father a child with a Chinese woman are exactly zero. Further, even if Chua has brilliant mothering tips, there’s no way I’m going to …
On Tiger Mamas, bad art, and the heart of a child Read More »
I started a garden last summer. It went to weeds, and then the weeds grew parched under the relentless Kansas sun, and then they withered and died. I traveled more than I’d anticipated, and when I was home other things competed for my time, if only fatigue. I think on that garden and I fear …
When I was a little boy, I was a pagan. Like our ancestors who had lost sight of God, yet saw visions of him in the luminescent peace of a harvest moon, or the spine-rattling fury of a thunderclap, I believed in supernatural things. I believed there were rituals and incantations to invoke them, or …
When young men take up guns and set about killing to satisfy whatever dark insanity has possessed them, I think of my sons. I think about the world in which they walk, a world that is physically safer than most people have ever known, but which is singed by the devil all the same, and …
I’ve got all four boys to myself and I’m trying to plot a course halfway across America, a course that doesn’t entail careening off an icy highway to our deaths. They are, meanwhile, chasing one another about upstairs, with occasional crashes that sound to me, hunkered in front of a computer below, like they are …
Yesterday we cooked and cooked and cooked, and ate and ate and ate, and it was delightful, even the cheesy squash casserole that makes my children instinctively gag just from looking at it. Especially the squash casserole, you little ingrates. My friend Johnny Utah, newly paroled, spent Thanksgiving with us. In order to make up …
On the giving of thanks, stomach viruses, and giant Christmas ornaments Read More »
On Sunday nights, after I’ve tucked in the boys, after I’ve packed my bags for another trip, I write each of them a note. I tell Caleb that I love the way he takes care of his younger brothers, or that I love his inquisitive spirit. I tell Eli that I love his perseverance, or …
I think the cook at a local eatery gave me an e coli burger because he didn’t like my hat. That’s the theory I’ve been operating under the last 48 hours. We went to the pumpkin patch as planned yesterday regardless, and it was lovely. I was miserable, but it was lovely. It’s good to …
Tonight is the night she shuddered out her last breath and left us holding the shell of a girl. I thought for a time it was to make me better, consumed as I am with me, and I thought maybe it was because God leaves no joy unpunished, and I reasoned there must be some …
A gymnasium strewn with upturned tables for barricades, a child-hearted husband and wife instigators of the fracas. Boys with single-shot pistols, automatics, rifles, rocket launchers, gathering to compare armaments. The older ones show the younger how to modify their weapons for greater velocity and range. Foam rounds fall from their pockets and collect around their …
I’m not overly prudish. I can appreciate a form-fitting skirt, a cool glass of whiskey, Everclear turned up good and loud. I’ve even been known to drop an expletive or two. But one thing I cannot abide is this trend, which took wing with Linda Blair’s exploitation in The Exorcist, of bathing children in filth …
More on the Great Woodlief Vacation of 2010, which might also have been titled: “You do know it’s 1400 miles to the East Coast, right?” When last I left off, I had just extricated the Big Love van from a midget-sized parking garage, and relocated it to West Virginia. Let’s pick up again outside the …
I took six books with me for a two-week vacation. Since I also took my four children, we have a clear indication that I understand neither math nor children. This may also explain why I found myself, through a series of events with which I won’t bore you, driving a 14-passenger van into Washington, D.C. …
