Tag: Parenting

Family Life

Wait, it’s my kids

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

A few days before Christmas, I was coming home late after being out attending to some delicate family matters, and I stopped at my favorite local Chinese restaurant for some food to bring home for supper. After placing my order with the manager, I decided to sit at the bar and wait for my order. There were two young professional women, perhaps into their early thirties, sitting in conversation near the south end of the small bar, so I walked to the north end, sat down on the corner where I’d have a view of the door leading to the kitchen, and ordered mys...

Media & Culture

Interiorizing Pop Brands

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written several posts related to the challenge of introducing growing children to the ubiquitous pop culture while minimizing the negative effects of the encounter on their moral and spiritual well-being. Given that ubiquitousness of pop culture, and that my primary responsibility toward my children is for their moral and spiritual formation, this is a big deal to me. I suspect this is also a big deal to many others, even to many who think that the moral and spiritual formation of their children is a secondary responsi...

Media & Culture

The Heart of the Matter (part 1)

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It seems to me there is little more critical for a parent to do than to work to understand exactly why and how things - and the ideas they convey - are dangerous for our children, so that decisions can be made and guidelines set that are based on sound principles, so they can be applied consistently, and eventually understood rationally by the children, which will allow them to likewise make their own principled decisions based on a sound understanding of the nature of the threats the world presents to them.

Media & Culture

Celebrity Gossip and Moral Reasoning (part 2)

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Subjective Objectivity is the nonsense name I give to the nonsensical, widespread phenomenon in contemporary society of viewing the world through the narrow lens of one’s own experience, and assuming that such personal experience defines the norm for reality. This view is cut straight from the cloth of what Pope Benedict XVI has famously called a dictatorship of relativism. Typically, when pressed to defend the personalized opinions that emerge from such self-centered thinking, most believers of the doctrine will retreat into relativism, claiming t...