Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table making sure everybody's socks match the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.

One of the darkest deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.

In itself homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man either a human being without feeling fear restraint or obligation.

I fear that in the end the famous debate among materialists idealists and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

The family only represents one aspect however important an aspect of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces primarily by TV commercials.

When you have a godly husband a godly wife children who respect their parents and who are loved by their parents who provide for those children their physical and spiritual and material needs lovingly you have the ideal unit.

In search of a complete education with the ideals of trust faith understanding and compassion many families are turning to the structure discipline and academic standards of Catholic schools.

It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong and about the law just punishment and discipline.

I think that my preaching style and many of my ideas and ideals about faith are based in both Pentecostal and Baptist background.