Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was a German Catholic priest and philosopher who was one of the most important influences on Catholic intellectual life in the 20th century.  His work influenced Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) and Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Pope Francis), who made Guardini’s work the focus of his doctoral dissertation (which was never completed). ...Read More

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) did not formulate a specific stage theory of the human life cycle as did his mentor Sigmund Freud who theorized about the stages of psycho-sexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital). However, throughout his life he gave us hints and insights into the chronological features of the human...Read More

I’ve been writing a lot the past couple of years and I wanted to let you know about two new books that have come out this year!  The first one is The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life.  This is a new edition of a book published by another publisher in 2008, that...Read More

Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development model represents probably the most well-known and highly regarded map of the human life cycle in contemporary western culture.  This theory was first articulated in 1950 in chapter seven (“The Eight Ages of Man”) of his book Childhood and Society, and further developed in later books and articles. Erikson...Read More

The concept of rites of passage was first articulated by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) in his book The Rites of Passage, first published in 1908.   In this seminal work, van Gennep subdivided rites of passage into three sub-categories:  rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation.  These rites might represent components of one...Read More