Sword&Spade

Dominic Andres had a job and a visa lined up to sell cars at military bases in Japan. He stayed home to start Roughhouse, a print adventure magazine for boys, instead. Today, he joins Jason Craig to explain why boys are hungry for something real and why it should arrive in the mailbox. In This Episode, We Cover: Why a magazine in the mailbox breaks the spell of the internet in a way no app for you...

Jerry LoCoco grew up in a trailer in rural Yuma, Arizona, the son of a violent father and a mother who became a meth addict when he was thirteen, and he spent years hiding that background behind a law degree and one accomplishment after another. None of it healed him. He joins Jason Craig to talk about the masks men build as boys, his novel, Gringo Salado, and the habits of silence, prayer, readin...

Marcellino D'Ambrosio spent years in youth ministry trying to win kids back from the school day and the sports schedule. It didn't work. He joins Jason Craig again to explain why Catholic men have mistaken their calling for a religious one, and why the real work in front of fathers is building a culture their children can actually live inside. In This Episode, We Cover: Why the Great Commission wa...

Adam Taylor, a former Marine and the son of Poetic Knowledge author James Taylor, has spent the last six years teaching his father's vision of education at St. Martin's Academy and is now co-founding St. Joseph's Academy in Mississippi. He tells Jason Craig how the goodness of his childhood carried him through a family tragedy and years apart from his father. He also makes the case that education...

Jason Craig asks Dr. Dan Schneider, author of The Liber Christo Method, whether the Catholic fascination with exorcism is actually helping men fight. Schneider argues the real battle runs through a man's own senses and the wounds he hasn't dealt with, and Craig adds that a man who won't face those wounds leaves his family to carry them.  In This Episode, We Cover: Why an unholy curiosity about the...

Jason Craig sits down with philosopher, homesteader, and Christendom College professor John Cuddeback, author of The Intentional Household , to ask why a home no longer becomes a household on its own. They work through the ordinary parts of family life—meals, manners, diapers, shared work, the care of the elderly—and why these are exactly where a household is either built or lost. Dr. Cuddeback ma...

When a thousand women who had abortions were asked who they consulted about the decision, the father of the baby came out first, and by a wide margin the most influential no matter what he said.  Alexander Hettinga leads the fatherhood and family team at Care Net, a network of more than 1,300 pregnancy centers, and he tells Jason Craig what happens when those men are finally spoken to as fathers r...

Jason Craig sits down with Brandon Sheard of Farmstead Meatsmith, a professed melancholic who set out to build a walled Eden where virtue would grow on trees. Instead, he found that he had picked every battle at once—home education, home medicine, home food, the family business—and run out of hours, energy, and gas. They talk about what limitation teaches a father, why the children raised in that...

Jason Craig talks with Shawn and Beth Dougherty, who bought the worst land in Ohio, spent years growing food on it, and now live in a house their own children built. They cover why college stopped looking like a necessary rite of passage, why a young couple should start out poor, and how a family takes back the work it has proxied out to industry. Weddings, funerals, food, and heat all come home i...

Recording on location at the Kingfisher Folkfest, Jason Craig puts a blunt question to an expert panel featuring Adam Taylor of St. Martin's Academy, Thomas Fickley of St. Dunstan's Academy, and educational consultant Patrick Faus. That question? How do you keep your homeschool from emasculating your son?  In This Episode, We Cover: Why anthropology determines formation, and what changes in a boy...

Joel Trumbo spent ten months a year overseas doing embassy security work before he took a teaching job that barely covered his mortgage and turned a childhood obsession with illuminated manuscripts into a business. In this conversation with Jason Craig, Joel walks through building Tamburn Manor—the hand-painted books, the cabins his high school sons live in, the forest school on his property—and m...

Andrew Tolkmith is the assistant literary editor at Word on Fire and author of "We Are What We Sing" in the Winter 2025 issue of New Polity. Today, he joins Jason Craig to make the case that folk music is not a genre but the way a people expresses itself, and that most men have inherited nothing to sing. They trace what recorded music replaced, how a song like Tom Dooley is born and handed down, a...

Jason Craig sits down with Tyler Blanski, author of Find Your Fight: Rugged Wisdom for Faithful Dads Who Refuse to Settle , who grew up certain that following Christ meant dreadlocks, an urban church plant, and probably a prison cell in a third world country. Now, he mows his lawn in a Minneapolis suburb and calls it his vocation. They talk about what it costs a man to trade a radical vision of Je...

Jason Craig welcomes his old friend Joseph Pearce. They make the practical case for localism and "small is beautiful" economics, tell the story of a whole community rallying to save its butcher from the regulators, and then turn to the hardest question facing Catholic fathers right now: why are so many good young men being pulled toward online white nationalism, and what do we put in front of them...

Joe Maki spent his working life in manufacturing—grinding, cutting, and polishing fake bones on a production floor—until his brother Mike told him to quit dreaming about laser-engraved tabletops and learn how to hold a tape measure. Two years later the table was finished. Six years ago, after his first child was born, he picked up clay for the first time since high school, and his first commission...

Marcellino D'Ambrosio, co-founder of Sherwood Fellows, joins Jason Craig to talk about what actually forms a man. Once the frontman of a punk band, Marcellino traces the ordeal that pulled him into seminary and then into marketing built on truth instead of manipulation. The conversation turns to the pattern of masculine initiation—danger, pain, and a father's blessing on the other side—and lands o...

Daniel Padrnos—co-founder of Supra Dinner Society and trained Tamada based in Seattle—joins Jason to explore the Georgian Supra: an ancient tradition of ritual feasting and toasting shaped by 1,700 years of Christian civilization in the Republic of Georgia. Daniel makes the case that hospitality is a distinctly masculine act and that the table your family already sits around is more powerful than...

James Taylor Foreman is a writer, the voice behind The Metaphor on Substack, and a contributor to Sword & Spade magazine. In this conversation with Jason Craig, James traces his journey from being born Catholic, through years as an atheist, and back to the Catholic Church — and the more personal story underneath: a recurring dream, a two-week wedding, and a move back to Louisiana to finish the...

Devin Schadt, founder and executive director of Fathers of St. Joseph, joins Jason Craig to trace the wounds men carry into marriage, the spirituality of St. Joseph, and what it actually means to be a son of God the Father. Drawing on his own story—a difficult childhood, a broken early fatherhood, and a daughter's life-threatening premature birth that cracked everything open—Devin unpacks why men...

In a world engineered to keep men indoors and inside their heads, philosopher and author Sebastian Morello—student of the late Roger Scruton and author of The Woodland Philosophy —argues that the path back to reality, to genuine culture, and to God runs through the wild. Drawing on a life of fox hunting, deer stalking, and spearfishing, Sebastian makes the moral and philosophical case that the hun...

The men who shaped you left you something—a set of stories, images, and convictions you draw on long after they're gone. Dr. Jason Baxter, Dante scholar and author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis and Why Literature Still Matters , joins Jason Craig to make the case that literature is the hidden architecture of masculine formation—and that fathers who neglect it are leaving their sons with less...

Jason Craig sits down with Stephen Crotts—illustrator of Malcolm Guite's Galahad and the Grail —to talk about what it means to be a maker in an age of AI slop, why creativity is a duty rooted in the Imago Dei, and how recovering a sense of place is essential to being human.  In This Episode, We Cover: Why AI can never bear the Imago Dei—and what that means for human art and expression The differen...

Rick Seigmund spent two decades on the front lines of federal law enforcement fighting human trafficking and online predation — and came home with a message most men aren't ready to hear. Now a woodworker, finish carpenter, and founder of the Family Readiness Project, Rick joins Jason to connect what might seem like two very different callings: building something permanent, and protecting somethin...

David Russell Mosley—convert, poet, and teacher —joins Jason Craig to discuss the cultural heritage of the Church, the importance of aesthetic choices, and what it means to be present as a father. They explore how classical education should prepare children not to live in the past, but to make new things worthy of the tradition they've inherited. In This Episode, We Cover: The "tweed-y pipe" aesth...

Dr. Jacob Imam of The College of St. Joseph the Worker and New Polity joins Jason to talk about a school that refuses to choose between the life of the mind and the life of the hands. The College of St. Joseph the Worker trains men in both the Catholic intellectual tradition and the skilled trades, graduating students with two certifications and no debt. In This Episode, We Cover: Dr. Imam's origi...