Parishes · Parents · Family Ministries · Schools
Keeping Your Kids Catholic
Why young Catholics leave — and what actually helps them stay.
Roughly four in ten baptized Catholics leave the faith by adulthood. Tom takes the question personally: he was one of four siblings, and one of twenty‑one cousins, to keep the faith — yet all eleven of his own children, and their spouses, are devout, practicing Catholics.
With honesty and humor, Tom names the real challenges — the perennial ones (suffering, doubt, habitual sin, the long passage of time) and the distinctly modern ones (limitless choice, comfort, and a culture that treats the faith as irrelevant or worse). Then he offers what he’s actually seen work: building a family culture, keeping devotions simple (“less is more”), forming friendships, “assimilate where you can and resist where you must,” and playing the long game with patience and prayer.
- Ideal for
- Parish keynotes, parent nights, family and marriage ministries, Catholic schools
- Formats
- 45–60 min keynote · parent evening with Q&A · multi‑session series
Adult Faith Formation · Apologetics · Young Adults
The Common Doctor for Uncommon Times
St. Thomas Aquinas, and faith and reason as “two wings.”
The man who changed Tom’s life — St. Thomas Aquinas — turns out to be exactly the teacher our confused age needs. In a warm, story‑rich hour, Tom walks through the life of the “dumb ox” whose bellowing filled the world, and draws out two teachings with surprising bite today: the dignity of the human person (body and soul) against the modern errors about the body, and the great reconciliation of faith and reason.
It’s substantive without being dry — an invitation to love the faith with the mind, and to see why, as St. John Paul II put it, “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
- Ideal for
- Adult formation, Theology on Tap, men’s groups, high schools & colleges, young adults
- Formats
- 60 min lecture with Q&A · classroom visit · multi‑part series
Men’s Groups · Retreats · Conferences
Authentic Catholic Manhood
Real strength looks like the Cross, not the locker room.
What does it mean to be a powerful man? Tom reframes the question around the virtues that actually make a husband and father strong: he seeks God first, loves his wife, serves rather than is served, humbles himself, makes peace in his home, and shows mercy. Drawing on Scripture and his own candid failures, Tom calls men to a strength that the world often mistakes for weakness — the strength of Christ himself.
- Ideal for
- Men’s groups and conferences, parish men’s retreats, fathers’ ministries
- Formats
- Keynote · half‑day or overnight retreat · series of reflections
Evangelization · RCIA / OCIA · Parish Missions
Coming Home
A convert’s road back to the Catholic Church.
Tom tells the story he knows best: how a cradle Catholic became an anti‑Catholic born‑again Protestant — even a would‑be pastor — and how an honest love of the great books, and a leap to Thomas Aquinas College, led him (and eventually his wife) all the way home to Rome. It’s a personal, often funny, deeply hopeful testimony of how the search for truth and the mercy of God meet.
- Ideal for
- Evangelization events, RCIA/OCIA, parish missions, young‑adult and convert ministries
- Formats
- Keynote testimony · parish mission night · fireside / Q&A