A Word from Our Outpost, with Joseph and Crystal Gruber

Marriage, we've heard, is hard. But it's probably harder than it needs to be. We talk about what good marriage formation looks like (well, insofar as we talk about how most of us don't receive what the Catholic Church has in mind for being fully prepared for marriage...), and then five really common issues that plague couples that desire to be missionary-minded in their ordinary, everyday lives. F...

Marriage is good. So good, in fact, that its goodness is supposed to overflow into the lives of the children it produces and the community in which it finds itself. And a Catholic marriage, ideally, is supposed to foster not just natural life, but also the supernatural life of faith. We don't hear too many people talking about marriage this way, so we thought we'd put it out there... We talk about...

'Ordinary' has had a bad rap these days. But when the Church, year after year, designates some to to being 'ordinary', it's worth dusting off the word and seeing some more potential to it. We used the Online Etymology Dictionary for this one— check it out and see why it’s Joseph’s favorite website! https://www.etymonline.com/  We talk about ordinariness as it relates to being well-ordered (ordered...

Paragraph 1 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that God created us so we could share in His own blessed life. About 1700 paragraphs later, the Catechism gets around to defining that state of blessing, commenting on Jesus' words at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, for those who are counting). I noticed looking at them a couple of weeks ago that I like everything about...

There is so much to say about this story! Two episodes clearly will not exhaust the topic. In the first part, we offered what the story wasn't about. In this second part, we offer the positive side, about several readings of the story that show what it is about.  We use the lenses of the four senses of Scripture, which we've podcasted on before ( https://ouroutpost.simplecast.com/episodes/25 ), to...

We've been using principles from Pat Lencioni's book, The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family , for years now to help us accomplish goals and be united in common purpose. As we've done so, we've also learned a lot more about what a household is, and what the Catholic Church has to say about what families are for. So during the staying-at-home, we've put together a workshop that we'd love to o...

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac, found in Genesis 22, has been appropriated by theologians, philosophers, atheists, agnostics, and now even by Joseph and Crystal. Hear a bit of our take on the story, starting with a bare bones sketch and why it's such a surprising story (not for the reasons people usually act surprised by it). We then go on to add more flesh to the story, as well as more conte...

Do we see the world as gift? Do we see each other as gift? Do we see ourselves as a gift?  Joseph and Crystal talk about the element of the Christian worldview that suffuses everyone and everything with wonder and should inspire gratitude.  "You can't give what you don't have" and you can't have anything unless you accept the world as gift. We talk about why receive people and things as gift, and...

Sometimes sacraments just aren't available-- e.g., being deployed in the military, being too sick to go to Mass, having to take care of someone who is ill,  having to keep enough people not-sick so that we don't overwhelm hospitals, or some other lack (St. John of the Cross was imprisoned by his own religious order for nine months!).  When these times of physical distance come up, we can use them...

We invited Bill and Angela Schnieders on to talk to us about their stories and how they have been pursuing their dreams. Bill left a stress-filled job in the tech industry to live on productive land, and Angela has pursued ongoing formation and her dreams for years...and then they met and got married! I don't think we reference as many works in this episode, but here are some things to check out:...

We talk about St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body, and then more particularly how things of this world are meant to be icons, not idols. We talk especially about marriage and parenting as icons that sometimes become idols, and about the fall of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai as they worshiped an idol instead of God.  At some point, Joseph references a podcast from Joseph Pearce, called Faith and...

Wherein we discuss the topic of fatherhood, especially in light of the many cultural portrayals ancient and modern of less-than-admirable fathers, and the role of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as Father in shaping our expectations. Joseph just finished reading John W. Miller's book, Calling God 'Father': Essays on the Bible, Fatherhood, and Culture , so we decided to talk about it. In a Ch...

Usually, when something in the Bible is filled with a bunch of names and places we don't recognize, we're tempted to skip ahead to more familiar parts. We take a few minutes to break down what happens in a particularly name-thick chapter, chapter 14 of Genesis, and unpack what it means and how it relates to our lives. Some themes we touch on are fatherhood, salvation, thanksgiving, the Eucharist,...

There's a lot to the topic of education, and we talk a bit about what C.S. Lewis thought of as one of the goals of education, a different way to consider what a school is, and how the home is, ideally, also a school of sorts. We reference an essay by C.S. Lewis, and I think the ideas are found in a collection of his essays by the name of Education and History . But if it's not in there, I've sent...

On January 18, 2020, Joseph took our 4-year-old daughter, Gisela, to the ER on account of labored/painful breathing and lethargy, only to discover that she would need emergency surgery for what turned out to be a necrotic and perforated stomach. Since then, we've been bouncing between the pediatric ICU, the Ronald McDonald House (a free housing service for families with kiddos in the hospital), an...

We have on a special guest, Rich Budd, who is the Director of Marriage and Family Life in the Lansing diocese, talking to us about one of his favorite topics, the domestic church.  You may know Rich Budd as one of the hosts of The Armchair Catholic ! We live in an odd era-- when the Church was new, St. Paul used the image of the family to help understand what the Church is; now, we work backwards...

Hospitality is a very Christian virtue, especially in this Advent season, when we remember the welcome Mary gives to Jesus, and the lack of welcome the Holy Family received in Bethlehem. In this episode, we don't talk about the Holy Family at all; instead, we just talk about how we've been approaching hospitality as a less-holy family. We know people who are better than us at hospitality, and we a...

We had enough fun with our first Q&A that we decided to do a second one! The second question of the podcast addresses some of the issues concerning the papacy, bishops, scandal, infiltrating ideologies, and our trust in the institution of the Church, which is a great topic if you want to practice conflict-resolution skills at your church! We address the following questions: "What is one 'life drea...

We asked a few listeners to submit questions, and we answer a random assortment of them! "If you had to describe Hope to an alien species who were unfamiliar with the concept, knew nothing of religion, and your description had to fit on a single post-it note what would you write?" Answer: 1:36 "Any tips for accompanying friends/family who are pulling away from the church?" Answer: 2:06 "How do you...

What's the difference between a useful or pleasant friendship and a virtuous friendship? And what's a practice that aids us in growing virtue whether we're the givers or the receivers of it? These two questions, and maybe others, are answered in this podcast... We reference Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (again), and John Cuddeback's True Friendship , as well as St. John Paul II's Love and Respons...

We discuss the necessity of beauty for the attractiveness of the good and the true, and beauty's role in moving us toward God. We're joined by Jacob Gruber, a seminarian, whose contributions to the discussion are great indeed. We reference Hans Urs von Balthasar right off the bat: https://www.amazon.com/Glory-Lord-Vol-2nd-Ed/dp/1586173219/ref=sr_1_16?keywords=hans+urs+von+balthasar&qid=1573075352&...

Repentance gets a bad rap, as it is so often preached without reference to the great goodness that repentance is. Both John the Baptist and Jesus preached repentance, and when they did  so, it was accompanied by the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven really was at hand, that God really was drawing close to His people, and that real change was possible.  We talk about the great gift of confession, the...

"Beauty will save the world," says Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky's less-famous novel, The Idiot . We talk about how chastity is the virtue that chooses the beautiful over the merely pleasant, the icon over the spectacle, the person over the object. When we see others rightly, as ends unto themselves, we become as we ought to be. When we become pure, as we ought to be, then we can see God (cf. Matt...

We're in the middle of a four-part series on three virtues that correspond to our ability to be sensitive to the transcendent: sobriety, excellence, and chastity. Excellence, as a general virtue, is in large part a response to the goodness of reality, and more particularly, a response to the good Creator of that reality. We talk about why we struggle to pursue excellence, struggling to be excellen...

Last week, we went over a basic Christian anthropology, with the upshot being that a fully alive, happy, and integrated person is a person a virtue-- who is prudent, just, fortitudinous, and temperate. This week, we'll begin to unpack how our ability to perceive the transcendent depends in part on embracing three virtues. Only the sober can know truth, only the excellent can choose the good, and o...