What a Society Honors, It Produces: The Case for Reclaiming the Home

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The Aristotle Problem No One Is Talking About

As reported by Madalaine Elhabbal (2026), John Cuddeback notes "We do not honor those who prioritize home life — either women or men." He points out that, for Aristotle, "a society tends to produce the kind of people it honors."

When a culture's reward structures in wages, status, and social recognition flow almost entirely toward measurable economic output, the slow, ordinary work of building a household becomes invisible. Invisible work, over time, becomes unvalued work. And unvalued work gets abandoned.

Cuddeback's recently published book, The Intentional Household: Living as if People Matter, takes this structural problem seriously. Families, he argues, are not failing for lack of desire. As Elhabbal (2026) reports, he told EWTN News: "Families today are struggling to achieve what they so badly want: to have the kind of relationships we're made for, beginning in the home, especially between spouses and between parents and children." The desire is present. The vision and the architecture for achieving it are not. Families "feel hamstrung," he said, frustrated by "a culture that works against them in many ways" and by the absence of clear models to pattern themselves after.

Why Passive Transmission Stopped Working

A generation ago, Catholic families could rely on the surrounding culture to reinforce the patterns of domestic life they had inherited. That transmission has broken down. As Shea (2020) documents in From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, parents who sent children to Catholic schools and took them to Mass — who, in their own words, "did everything our own parents did" — still lost them from the Faith. The surrounding atmosphere had shifted, and the inherited, passive strategy could not compensate.

That shift makes Cuddeback's eight-pillar framework more than a self-help proposal. Within the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, Titus, Vitz, and Nordling relay Benedict XVI’s account of the family as comprising "privileged interpersonal relationships that are the first school of life and virtue for its members" (Benedict XVI, 2005, as cited in Titus et al., 2020). That formation does not happen passively. It requires structure, intention, and a clear sense of what the home is actually for.

The 'Yes' That Makes the 'No' Possible

Cuddeback is careful to frame his eight pillars as generative rather than prohibitive. As Elhabbal (2026) reports, he says his book "gives the 'yes' that strengthens the 'nos' we need to say" — particularly regarding technology. That framing matters both clinically and pastorally. A household ordered around communal life does not need to wage a constant defensive battle against screens; it has something better to offer than the screen does. The positive vision does the work that prohibition cannot sustain.

He draws on Wendell Berry's insight that "the loss of activities of work and leisure in the home has led to our experience of disconnection and isolation." Berry’s own argument, as Cuddeback relays it, runs in both directions: domestic life unravelled largely because worthwhile work left the home, so recovery depends on bringing that work back — work that ties people to each other, to their bodies, to the earth, and finally to God (Elhabbal, 2026). That argument fits the Catholic Christian anthropology of the person as an embodied, relational, transcendent being — not a unit of economic productivity.

For families willing to act on that vision, Cuddeback offers an accessible entry point: "[a]nyone can choose to be intentional about their household and make real progress with dramatic fruits in the lives of those we love most" (Elhabbal, 2026). The ceiling is not talent or circumstance. It is attention — and the decision to treat the home as the site of the most serious human work there is.

References

Elhabbal, M. (2026, September 12). Catholic professor calls families to reclaim the home in a technological age. EWTN News. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/catholic-professor-calls-families-to-reclaim-the-home-in-a-technological-age

Shea, J. (2020). From Christendom to apostolic mission: Pastoral strategies for an apostolic age. University of Mary Press. pp. 44–45.

Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Interpersonally relational. In P. C. Vitz, W. J. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 306–330). Divine Mercy University Press.