Michael Parrott, who teaches at Benedictine College, writes about the life of the home with a deep thoughtfulness. In conversation, he returns to the hearth not simply as a source of heat, but as something that once gave the room a centre and drew family life around it. His reflections move between childhood memory, modern convenience and cultural loss, but remain grounded in a simple conviction: that visible warmth does more than comfort us. It teaches us how to gather, to linger and to be present with one another.
In your article The Fire Went Out for Crisis Magazine, you describe the hearth as the heart of the home. What role did fire play in your household growing up?
We had a real fireplace growing up, and on cold nights it became the place we naturally gravitated towards. I still remember the crackle, the glow, the smell of woodsmoke, and the way the whole room seemed to change when the fire was lit. I would often lie on the floor by the fire as a boy and read or play.
We had central heating, so the fire was not strictly necessary. In a way, that is what made it so meaningful. It was not just doing a job. It was doing something central heating could never do. It made warmth visible. It gave the room a centre. It made us slow down, sit together and be present to one another.
As a child, I would not have had the language for any of that. I just knew there was something almost magical about a real fire, something alive, human and deeply consoling. Looking back, I think that instinct was right. The hearth did not simply heat the house. It ordered the house. It made home feel more like home.
Modern heating systems have made homes more comfortable, but they have also made warmth invisible. Do you think that has changed the way we relate to one another at home?
Yes, I do. Modern heating is efficient, but it is also strangely sterile. Warm air comes through vents, the thermostat clicks, and the whole thing happens anonymously. We get temperature without presence, comfort without ceremony, warmth without a visible source.
I think our domestic lives have started to resemble our heating systems. Everyone is comfortable, but everyone is also dispersed. We are under the same roof, yet often scattered into separate rooms, separate devices and separate little worlds. The old hearth drew people towards a common centre. It made warmth something shared. Modern systems make comfort ambient, private and almost forgettable.
The hearth did more than warm a room. It created a focal point for family life. It asked people to gather, to linger and to face the same light. So yes, I think invisible warmth has changed the way we relate to one another. We solved the problem of cold beautifully, but we may have lost some of the human meaning that once came with being warmed together.
Much of the debate around wood burning now focuses on emissions and efficiency. What do you think gets missed when the conversation becomes purely technical?
What gets missed is the human person in full. Once the conversation is reduced entirely to emissions, efficiency and quantified risk, only the things that can be measured get treated as real.
Of course prudence matters. Of course safety matters. I am not arguing for recklessness, and I am not pretending there are no trade offs. But there is something deeply impoverished about a worldview that meticulously counts measurable harms while dismissing formative goods as sentimental or irrelevant simply because they do not fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
A hearth teaches things. It teaches patience, because fire cannot be rushed. It teaches responsibility, because it must be tended. It teaches realism, because neglect has consequences. It teaches wonder, because flame still has the power to arrest us and draw us out of ourselves. And it teaches family life, because people gather around what is living, luminous and shared.
None of that shows up very well in a technical analysis, so modern people are tempted to act as though it does not exist. I was not trying to write a quaint defence of nostalgia. I was trying to push back against a technocratic habit of mind that assumes whatever cannot be measured must not matter very much. That is a disastrous way to think about human life.
You suggest that when the hearth disappeared, something cultural disappeared with it. What, to you, has been lost?
What was lost was not just a feature of home design or an older heating technology. What was lost was a whole domestic grammar, a whole little school of human formation built into the daily life of the household.
The hearth taught a family how to live together. Winter pressed people inward. Fire had to be fed. Ashes had to be cleared. Light mattered because darkness was real. Warmth mattered because it was not automatic. Children learned, before anyone ever gave them a lecture, that good things require attention, restraint, patience and care. That is not nothing. That is culture in its most ordinary and powerful form.
I think something religious was lost too, or at least made thinner. So many of our traditions were once anchored in a world where the home had a visible centre. Stockings by the fire, St Nicholas treats left at the hearth, the relief of warmth in the midst of winter, the significance of light in a dark season. These things were not arbitrary decorations. They made sense in a world where the body and the home were still being instructed by the season itself.
When the hearth disappeared, we did not merely remove smoke, risk or inconvenience. We also removed a quiet apprenticeship in gratitude, waiting, attentiveness and wonder. And then we wonder why home feels flatter, family feels thinner, and even Advent and Christmas sometimes feel strangely weightless.
For those who no longer have a fireplace or stove at home, are there ways the principles of the hearth, gathering, attention, patience and hospitality, can still be preserved?
Yes, absolutely, but now it has to be done intentionally. The deeper principle of the hearth was never just flame for its own sake. It was shared attention. It was a visible centre. It was the experience of being drawn together rather than drifting apart.
So even in a hearthless home, families can recover something of that old wisdom by creating real centres of presence: a dinner table where phones are absent and meals are not rushed, candles lit in the evening, regular reading aloud, family prayer at a fixed place and time, hospitality that welcomes others into the warmth of the home, even an outdoor fire pit when that is possible. In many homes, the table can become a kind of hearth if it is treated as more than a place to refuel and scatter.
I would also say we need to stop flattening the seasons. Let winter be winter a little bit. Go out into the cold. Come back into warmth. Let the darkness of Advent be felt so that the light of Christmas means something again. Slow the pace. Lower the lights. Bake bread. Create one room in the home where people naturally gather instead of disappearing into private, climate controlled corners.
In other words, build a centre, even if you do not have a chimney. The form may be different now, but the need has not changed. A home still needs some place, and some set of habits, where people are taught to linger, to attend, to receive one another and to be grateful. That, more than anything, is what I was trying to defend in the article: not merely a fireplace, but a way of life.
