Kick Family Pop-Culture to the Curb
A new forum and archive of homilies, essays, publications, podcasts, videos, etc.
About “The Way of the Family”
Hello, my name is Fr. Deacon Christopher. I serve a Greek Catholic parish in West Michigan and live on a small farm with my wife and son raising pastured chickens and sheep. I am the author of Catholic Money: A Father Teaches his Son About Family Finances and I work as a staff writer for the Acton Institute.
The mission of this project, “the way of the family”, is to reframe the way we think about family life by helping families re-discover our Catholic heritage, family culture, and the wisdom of the ages pertaining to family flourishing.
I am the oldest of five children, and when I was 15-years-old (1992), my family moved to a small village in the foothills of the Austrian Alps for three years. My father, Dr. David B. Warner, was a professor of theology and history at Franciscan University’s study abroad program.
The campus was located at a 13th century Carthusian monastery, about 20-miles walking distance from the famous Mariazell shrine in Niederösterreich.
Living in Europe during those years was one of the happiest times in my life. Pilgrimaging around Italy, Austria, Spain, France, Slovakia, Poland… my Catholic faith came alive in every church, shrine, and trail traversing old Christendom! Catholic Europe may have lost its faith, but it had not lost its culture.
In America we suffer the opposite problem. More Americans believe in God and claim Christianity than any other developed nation in the world, but we have very little Christian (Catholic) culture to show for it.
While we were living in Austria, everything was oriented around the family, the outdoors, and the Catholic liturgical rhythm. We fasted and feasted with the Church seasons (especially feasting with Mass, processions, parades, traditional music, and traditional clothing throughout the village).
In the winter evenings we would gather as a family around the wood stove in the living room and my father would read aloud to us from the Chronicles of Narnia or we would invite students over to the house and sing Christmas carols around the tree, aglow with candle light.
In the summer we would take long hikes through the pine scented mountains, pervaded with shrines and chapels where pilgrims could stop and pray as they rambled around the countryside. After working all day on the monastery renovation team, I would cold plunge in an mountain stream, fed by snow melt-off.
During the academic year we would have daily Mass in the gorgeous 13th century monastery chapel. I sang in the university choir: Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Mozart… During the week we studied theology, philosophy, history, and literature, and on the weekends we visiting the lands and places where these Catholic humanities were developed—where the drama of Catholic history had predominantly taken place for 1600 years.
No TV, no internet, no smart phones, no cars, no pop-music, no adolescent pop-culture, no Walmart or Amazon, no Disney or Netflix, no social media … just beautiful architecture, beautiful music, beautiful mountains, face-to-face conversations with family, students, and friends. It was, well… Catholic and culturally rich in every way imaginable.
I have lived back in the United States since 1999, and since that time I have struggled to find and create Catholic culture in America, but it is possible.
I taught for 15 years in Catholic schools where I was able to introduce good British and American literature and music to my students and their parents.
I married a well-catechized Virginian who spent 8 years in a cloistered monastery where she learned to converse, pray, garden, care for the sick, cook, and clean like a Saint.
We worship in a Greek Catholic parish which has a very Old World cultural vibe with the food, traditional clothing, language and musical tradition.
We live on a small farm where we homeschool and raise about half our own food, especially meat.
We don’t have a cable subscription, don’t do video games, and we greatly limit our screen time in the evenings.
We live near Catholic, extended family members (mom and siblings with their families), so we can spend Catholic holidays together and share a common way of life.
We have opted out of the American sports culture, so our evenings and weekends are at home on the farm, with family, or at church, and we aren’t taxiing children all over the city and state for pee-wee games.
But I will be honest; it is a major struggle to live as a Catholic in 21st century America. It is almost impossible to thrive as a Catholic in this day and age. It takes heroic effort, firm resolve, and a commitment to living a way of life very different from most of our neighbors.
It is also very expensive to live a wholesome way of life. We didn’t move to the country to save money on grocery bills, I can tell you that, and Catholic education is not cheap. However, it must still be possible to live a Christian way of life because God put us here, in this time period, for a reason.
In 2017, my wife and I realized we needed some help with our finances. Four theology degrees and 8 years of celibate community life had not prepare us for the responsibilities of managing household finances.
We had gone through Dave Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University” when we were first married, and that was very helpful, but it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t Catholic. We were 10 years into marriage with no savings and still over $100,000 in debt.
We decided to hire a financial coach and it was one of the best decisions we have made in our marriage. We paid off our debt, including the mortgage, and learned how to invest a portion of our savings every month.
These newly learned skills inspired me to study personal finance and investments more closely and after hundreds of hours of research and training, I wanted to “give back” by launched a coaching business, on the side, in 2022, and to be honest, it hasn’t done so well because I haven’t done a great job getting the word out… I need your help.
I am launching this Substack for three reasons:
I have written over 200 articles, essays, and blog posts on family flourishing and these pieces, as well as the 200+ future essays and conversations that are in my head, need a home. My hope is that many families will greatly benefit from both the free and subscriber content on this sight and want to share it with friends and family.
It’s about building Catholic culture together. By creating an online community, I expect my content to improve with client interaction and feedback, which can be more widely shared and have a greater impact. My book sales have done well, but my readers haven’t had a hub where we can continue to engage.
I also hope to help a select group of couples with their financial issues. Money isn’t everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen when it comes to thriving in family life. If you are spiritually/religiously wealthy, but financially broke, let’s talk.
Why subscribe?
In a world that moves at breakneck speed, even the brightest minds struggle to carve out time for thoughtful reading. We're bombarded daily by an endless stream of flashy headlines and attention-grabbing visuals. Yet, amidst this chaos, timeless ideas and well-crafted insights continue to shine, proving that clarity and depth will always cut through the noise.
I know not everything I write outshines the neon hype, but I am hoping a few words here and there will make a difference in your family life.
1. It’s About the Family
It’s no secret that the family has been under relentless attack for a long time. The enemy has executed a fantastic campaign against traditional Western (Catholic/Christian) tradition, thought, and culture in the modern age. More recently, the Sexual Revolution, which continues into the present day, has made fornication, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, trans-humanism, contraception, abortion, divorce, cohabitation, and sex trafficking so blasé, nobody seems to care or notice anymore… unless you’re a parent.
This forum is for parents practicing their faith, doing their best to raise upright kids in an upside down world, who need support. It’s for married couples who are struggling to make ends meet and for students looking for career & vocation advice. It’s for clerics and ministers who work every day with family members who are striving for holiness.
I have created this forum as a place to store and share all of my writing, audio, and visual content regarding family life: marriage, parenting, household finances, education, investing, homesteading, health, etc.
2. Traditional Family Norms will Ride the Storm
The keys to a happy marriage, financial freedom, well-behaved children, career success, and a wonderful life are no secret. These keys are part of our Judeo-Christian cultural inheritance; an inheritance that is freely bestowed on those who are willing to do the intellectual work of re-discovering the lost treasures of our ancestors.
We have a proven, 4,000 year-old tradition for how to flourish in family life that has been rejected by mainstream, post-modern, post-Christian, secular culture.
What is worse, Catholics are so afraid of getting embroiled in another Galileo controversy that they will bend over backwards to align Catholic teaching in conformity with the latest advancements in “science”, technology, or philosophy, irrespective of the fact that much of what we call science and philosophy today is based on false or incomplete anthropological, spiritual, and material premises.
Meanwhile, all the answers to life’s most important questions have not changed. They are recorded for posterity in the Sacred Scriptures (the Bible), the writings of the Fathers of the Church, the Greco-Roman philosophers, and the writings of the Saints and Doctors of the Church.
The Church bestows this inheritance without reservation on those who are seeking the truth, who are living the sacramental life of the Church in a state of grace, are eager to drink from the Fountain of Life, and willing to conform their life to truth when they find it.
Truth is a person, Jesus Christ, and all Christians of the true faith know that the Pearl of Great Price cannot be purchased with earthly riches, but rather comes to those who seek and guard Holy Wisdom with clean hands and a pure heart, who desire not worthless things.
3. What to Expect
How often will you be posting? I will be posting my Sunday homily each week sometime before Saturday morning. This homily is available for paid subscribers and is intended as an aid for clergy who are following the Greek Catholic/Orthodox cycle of readings, as my parish is on the Gregorian calendar. Laymen and non-Greek clerics who are looking for a weekly, orthodox, family-oriented sermon to read are welcome to subscribe as well. These homilies are about 600 words (5 minutes) long.
What will free subscribers get? I will also be posting previous and future published essays, book excerpts, and blog posts on a periodic basis and I have podcasts and videos out in cyberspace that need a home as well as my written content, so stay tuned. For now, this is what I imagine:
free access to archived published essays, in one place
free access to blog posts, past and future
free links to select podcast interviews and videos
free access to select book excerpts, past and future
free access to my recommended reading lists for parents
free access to some of my favorite quotes
What does a paid subscription buy? In addition to the above:
subscriber-only posts on family finance and investing and access to the full archive
post comments and join the community
a weekly Sunday homily based on the readings of the Greek Catholic/Orthodox calendar posted before Saturday morning
Do founding members get a bonus gift? Yes! In addition to the above:
my simple 7-step video investment course ($1000 value) for those who want to start investing, but don’t know where or how to begin
Subscribe to get full access to all homilies, essays, investment tips, media content, and publication archives.
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Join a community of likeminded families and pastors
Be part of a community of family members who are committed to restoring traditional family life and Catholic culture in the world. Participate in the comments section and support this work with a subscription.