A Word from Our Outpost, with Joseph and Crystal Gruber

In Dietrich von Hildebrand's epic tome, Transformation in Christ , he writes that the thing without which there is not the Christian life is a readiness to change. Listen in to find out more! As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter list here ! catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ourou...

Merry Christmas, from Our Outpost to Yours! As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter list here ! catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/ see what we have upcoming in terms of events here: https://ouroutpost.org/events/ send us an email at hello@ouroutpost.org If yo...

Am I my brother's keeper? Is he mine? What responsibility do we have to one another? Is the answer to Cain's question all that straightforward? Listen in to find out more! As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter list here ! catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/...

A sixth-born and a twelfth-born walk onto a podcast... Joseph and his brother, Fr. Jacob, reflect on what openness to life means and goodness of having a large family. As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter list here ! catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/ see...

Signs of Christmas are starting to appear everywhere-- in stores, on the radio, on lawns and across roofs, in homes, and we're wondering: is that a bad thing? Listen in to a  discussion between Joseph and his brother, Fr. Jacob, about celebrating Christmas outside the Christmas season! As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email news...

Scripture is shallow enough for a lamb to wade and deep enough for an elephant to bathe, so saith St. Gregory the Great. So for this episode, we'll do a shallow review of salvation history with little vignettes that show some of the depths to be plumbed. There are six main salvation history moments before Christ: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the Babylonian Exile. Listen in for takeaways...

Christ is king, but not like any other king. His authority comes from a completely different way of conceptualizing power. The constrained vision of authority as a permanent power struggle is something Christ totally side-steps, and that changes how we understand Him, our role in the world, and our role in our homes. Listen in to find out more!   And if you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign...

If we believe in a God Who hears us, intercessory prayer makes all the sense in the world. And yet. And yet, sometimes we relegate intercessory prayer to the background. This episode explores three reasons Joseph might do so-- maybe one or more might strike home with you, too!   As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter...

Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Salvation.  The gospel, if anything, is a response to the brokenness we all experience (and participate in...).  Here's a way to talk about it! As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here ! join our email newsletter list here ! catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/...

Evangelization has become something of a buzz-word in Catholic circles today. Worse than that, sometimes it takes on an inhuman and mechanistic tone that couldn't be further from the truth. So Joseph unpacks what he means by evangelization, and what he suspects the Church also means... Here's the cycle in picture form!   If you're a Catholic husband and would like 45 minutes with Joseph, sign up h...

"Lord, don't trust Philip today."  Simple, profound, hilarious, and supremely useful, this prayer has long been a favorite of Joseph's, and in this episode, he shares why.   If you're a Catholic husband, you can sign up for 45 minutes with Joseph here: https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here !...

This past Sunday's gospel reading was about the rich young man, and one thing that may not have been immediately evident is how tied it is to the notion of marriage. Listen in to find out more! If you're a Catholic husband, you can sign up for 45 minutes with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage me...

Happy 200th episode, everybody!! Christ instituted seven sacraments. Three of them are sacraments of initiation, two of them are for healing, and two, friends, are ordered toward the salvation of other people. Those two sacraments are holy orders (deacons, priests, and bishops) and matrimony. Hear how we unpack how matrimony is meant to be an apostolic institution, truly missionary in its beauty!...

Have you ever been to a talk on evangelizing and been told that everyone has a testimony to share?  It's partially true. But where it's partially false, it can be extremely damaging to people. Because not everyone has a testimony to share right now, but everyone is in the midst of the greatest love story ever told.    If you're a Catholic husband, feel encouraged to sign up for some time to talk w...

One thing missionaries need to be able to do is to start friendly conversations. Joseph may not be the most charming and extroverted fellow, but he spent years thinking and trying out different ways to start conversations with strangers-- here are some thoughts on the process! Here's a link for Catholic husbands to spend 45 minutes with Joseph: https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph...

One of Joseph's favorite questions to ask people is "What have you been reading recently?" It's both prompted great conversation, as well as produced a number of awkward moments.  Matthew Kelly has said, "We become the books we read"-- so if we're interested in who people are and who they're becoming, what they're reading is incredibly important! Here's a link for Catholic husbands to spend 45 min...

We're in a pretty failure-averse world. There's not much mercy and not much margin for error in a world where our mistakes can be plastered across screens throughout the world.  So how do we wrap our heads around failure, and what kinds of failure are out there? Turns out, there's at least three kinds of failures-- one for when we're learning and growing, one for when we unintentionally wander, an...

Nathaniel Hawthorne has a lovely version of the story of King Midas, called "The Golden Touch," and Joseph read it aloud to his kids recently. While it's ostensibly about greed, it's also about exchanging real life for sterile, un-smellable, un-tasteable, un-nourishing shiny facsimiles. In other, unrelated news, how's your smartphone looking these days?   Here's Hawthorne's story: https://www.gute...

It's weird how scandalous it sounds, that life is worth living, sharing, and multiplying. But these are ways we're inclined to be, to behave, and to desire as human beings. So saith Aristotle, Aquinas, and me, your friendly neighborhood podcaster. (Joseph did mis-speak-- it's in question 94, article 2, not question 86, of first part of the second part of the Summa: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/...

Our social fabric is threadbare these days, and making invitations is our way of re-enforcing, patching, and strengthening society. Joseph talks about having invite-to-able lives, about making clear invitations, and handling rejection. Those are the things he needs to hear, so he's guessing you might too!   On our website, if Catholic husbands have a minute (or 45) to talk with Joseph about some o...

How proud am I?  Do I think I'm wiser than I really am? Do I think I'm stronger than I really am? Do I think I'm more excusable than I really am? Probably. And that, my friends, is prideful. Listen in to find out more! Here's the website for Catholic singles (aged 22-35ish): https://ouroutpost.org/dating/ As always,  support our work by going here ! join the monthly marriage membership here !...

If we want to live in harsh conditions, we could wear appropriate equipment, we could change the conditions, or (maybe impossibly) we could change ourselves to adapt to those conditions. If we want to live in perfect love, there's a temptation to either become superficial or water down what it means to live perfect love, while the only real option is the seemingly-impossible one: we need to change...

Marriage can be great for many reasons, but its greatness is not one of the reasons Joseph talks about getting married. What does he talk about? The sacrament of marriage fundamentally re-orients us to with respect to time, it stitches together a broken society, and the process of finding a spouse can and should help raise the collective bar for men and women-- so will call single men and women to...

Here's the text of the passage from Mark 4:35-41: On that day, as evening drew on, Jesus said to his disciples: “Let us cross to the other side.” Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was. And other boats were with him. A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They w...

Aristotle writes about three different kinds of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics . It's not uncommon to hear talks about friendship, and how of the three kinds, the best/truest kind of friendship needs to be focused on. We even have some episodes about that very thing.  But what Joseph noticed recently is that we're suffering not just from a lack of virtuous/true friends. We're suffering, too,...