​Dave came to Adam’s house to record and brought a host, a co-host, a topic, and a bottle of whiskey. No laptop. No microphones. No headphones. No headphone amp. Second time he has pulled that off. In his defense, he already hauled a computer over there for a permanent setup so he would not have to schlep gear across town every week, and in Adam’s defense, that computer is still sitting there unplugged. So they went home, came back the next night, and recorded anyway. Second night in a row. For such a time as this.Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, every person they asked gave them the same name. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether you are leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and look at what they have ready for you.First, the Wiffle Ball tournament. There is a tradition in the Catholic Tulsa community on Labor Day, admittedly a niche corner of it, where the Hanisch family turns their entire backyard into a real Wiffle Ball field. Scoreboard. Foul poles. Pitching mound. Dirt. Bases. Bleachers. Concession stand. Instant replay. A bubble machine that fires when somebody goes deep. Eight teams, double elimination. Adam and Dave play with Adam’s brother-in-law Holden, Mark Gabriel, and Brandon Bargus under the name Wiffle While You Work. Roughly ten years of this, and they had never won it. This year they made the championship game and lost by a run, 6 to 5. Ten years ago the wives played and it was a hang. Now teams recruit former ballplayers, one of whom had a family thing come up, which Adam called lucky out loud. Shout out to Chris and Carrie Hanisch, who carry the whole ordeal, and to Mark Gabriel, who sponsored it this year. This is what it looks like when a family says we have something to offer and then offers it, every year, on purpose.Which got Dave onto something he has been chewing on since they were all at Brandon Sheard’s place for a rock put. Heaviest rock, longest throw, get the men in a line. Everybody looked at the guy who was obviously going to win, and he won, and it did not matter. The women and kids watched the men compete, and Dave watched what it did to the community. So here is the idea: whenever your friends gather, have a men’s competition. Every time. Croquet, a heavy rock, flipping a quarter closest to a line, it does not matter what it is. What matters is that it is only for men, because the boys need to see it. A boy needs to look at that line and understand that he is a boy and those are men, and then he needs to be summoned across. Not by his own father. By another man in the community who calls him up and gives him the right to stand and compete. That is a rite of passage, and American culture has almost none left. It is also cheap, easy, and a lot more fun than standing around. There were zero women in the Wiffle Ball tournament this year, and there were young boys playing next to the men, faster than the men, and considerably less sore the next day.The campout is in a couple of weeks, last weekend of September like always, and it is more than full. Brandon Sheard will be there. Tomas from Ultimo Cigar will be there. Get away, pray with the monks, see all the men. If you missed it, put next year on the calendar now.The pour is Octomore 16.2 from Bruichladdich, a super peated Islay scotch aged five years in wine and sherry casks at 58.1 percent. A 2025 limited release. If you like peat, start with Laphroaig, Lagavulin, and Ardbeg, then understand that Octomore was the first distillery to put out something genuinely insane on the peat scale. Others have since gone higher in parts per million, and most of those were gimmicks that came and went. Dave’s honest rule on expensive bottles is that a $200 bottle is almost never $100 better than a $100 bottle. Octomore was the first time he thought it actually was. A whiskey after his own heart.Then the topic: the universal destination of goods, Catechism 2402, which sits under the Seventh Commandment. Thou shalt not steal. That placement tells you something. God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind, to care for it, master it by labor, and enjoy its fruits, and the goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. Not for you specifically. All of it, the oceans on planets nobody has found yet down to the bacteria underfoot, aimed at the good of mankind.Adam gave the line the whole episode hangs on. The five acres you own are truly yours. But not merely yours.So why private property at all? Aquinas gives three reasons, and they hold up. Industriousness, because a man tends his own garden harder than he tends the community garden, not from selfishness but because shared duty spreads thin and nobody owns the outcome. Order, because affairs run more smoothly when each man is responsible for a specific thing. And peace, because quarrels multiply when property is held in common without distinction. Buy a boat with four families and find out. Somebody leaves trash in it, somebody scrapes the hull, somebody drives it hard and it breaks down, and now you are all negotiating who pays. Adam gave the other side its due: shared ownership lowers the cost of entry, and if every man is limited to a suburban backyard there is simply no beef, because a cow needs more land than that. Four families together can afford ground that feeds all four. There is a place for each. Every community has to find the order.The two ditches are individualism and collectivism, and this is the road between them. Private property is not a concession to greed. It flows out of what a family is. Sacred means set apart, and a family is set apart from the community by its nature, so it makes sense that a piece of creation gets set apart to match. A man needs somewhere he can say what is inside here is exclusive to my family, because the family itself is exclusive by nature. Raising your children on your own ground is not a detour from the good of mankind. It is how you serve it. Dave put it plainly: he is raising four daughters and three boys, and he needs the Minihan family raising strong holy young men, and Adam needs the same from him. Families are not sufficient to themselves. That is the debt.All of which is stewardship. This is God’s house and you are managing it, and the King is coming back to see how it was kept, and eventually He wants all of it back. Your children most of all. Their souls were handed to you to tend so that they flourish into who they were made to be, and the fruit of that gets shared with everybody.St. John Chrysostom says surplus has to be counted as stolen goods when the wealthy ignore the destitute in front of them. Dave admitted the part that is actually hard. When he has extra eggs, he knows it instantly and gives them away gladly, no friction. Natural goods are easy to read. Man made goods are not. He cannot tell when he has a surplus of the things he bought, and he is worse at parting with them, even though they are of a lower order than food. He has too many T-shirts. He knows he has too many T-shirts. He pulls one out that has not been worn in fifteen years and hears himself say but what if. He is also fair about the old quotes on the unworn shoes in your closet belonging to the barefoot, which come from a world where a man owned one pair of shoes, not work boots and dress shoes and tennis shoes. Owning a few pairs is not theft. But if you can afford the next pair and cannot afford to give in proportion to your station, that is worth an honest look, because self love is pernicious and easy to feed.Adam brought it back to the ground. Haylee was in Oklahoma City, he finally got the kids down, he was not feeling well, and he was in bed when he remembered the chickens were not up and the pigs had no water. He laid there a long time talking himself out of it. What he learned about himself is how easily he can do that, and how good the excuses sound. Six months ago these were the responsibilities he was praying for. Everybody does this. You want the promotion, you get the promotion, and then you resent the people and problems that came with it, when the problems were the thing you asked for. That is where virtue lives: doing the thing when nobody is watching and your appetites are voting against it. Protect what you were given. Provide for it. Establish your children so they can stand without you, because you do not want to be a helicopter dad when they are 28. And the man who buries his talent in the yard was not evil. He was just tired.Francis de Sales, in Introduction to the Devout Life, lands it. A man may possess wealth. He must not let wealth possess his heart. Detachment is what keeps money a servant to the family first and then to the poor, in that order, because subsidiarity is real and you do not take food off your children’s plates to be generous elsewhere. God does call men to wealth. The virtue of magnificence needs them. St. Peter’s does not get built without them, and neither does your parish church. The question to keep asking is whether a thing gives you comfort or gives you happiness, because those are not the same and one of them will quietly own you.Truly yours. Not merely yours. Raise your glass.TOPICS COVEREDShowing up to record a podcast with a topic, a bottle of whiskey, and none of the recording equipmentThe permanently installed computer that nobody has plugged inThe Labor Day Wiffle Ball tournament in the Catholic Tulsa community, and the Hanisch backyard field with foul poles, instant replay, and a bubble machineTen years of Wiffle While You Work, a…