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A Man Named Joseph: Guardian for Our Times
After spending more than a millennium in relative obscurity, Saint Joseph has become the second-most mentioned saint in the papal magisterium after the Virgin Mary. To understand the life and importance of Saint Joseph, a good place to start is with the first papal title ever granted him: “Patron of the Universal Church.”
What is it that Saint Joseph has to offer the Church — and each one of us — today? That’s the question that A Man Named Joseph: Guardian for Our Times seeks to answer. To get there, author, podcaster, and blogger Joe Heschmeyer cuts through a lot of our misconceptions to see what the Bible and the earliest Christians really say about Joseph as a model husband, father, and saint. Questions at the end of each chapter help guide personal reflection and group discussion.
Whatever we may be facing in life, we can go to Joseph for his example, his protection, and his prayers.
What is it that Saint Joseph has to offer the Church — and each one of us — today? That’s the question that A Man Named Joseph: Guardian for Our Times seeks to answer. To get there, author, podcaster, and blogger Joe Heschmeyer cuts through a lot of our misconceptions to see what the Bible and the earliest Christians really say about Joseph as a model husband, father, and saint. Questions at the end of each chapter help guide personal reflection and group discussion.
Whatever we may be facing in life, we can go to Joseph for his example, his protection, and his prayers.
144 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
About the author
Joe Heschmeyer
8 books95 followersKansas City native Joe Heschmeyer is a staff apologist for Catholic Answers. A popular author, speaker, blogger, and podcaster, he joined the apostolate in March 2021 after three years as an instructor at Holy Family School of Faith in Overland Park, Kan.
While at School of Faith, Joe focused primarily on formation for the Kansas City Archdiocese’s elementary and high school teachers. He also spent a year helping to manage the Catholic Spiritual Mentorship program.
Prior to his work at School of Faith, he discerned the priesthood from 2012-17 for the Archdiocese of Kansas City. During that time, he earned both a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis and a baccalaureate degree in sacred theology (S.T.B.) from Rome’s Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum).
A regular contributor to Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers Focus, and Catholic Answers Magazine (print and online) even before joining the apostolate, Joe has blogged at his own “Shameless Popery” website and co-hosted a weekly show called “The Catholic Podcast.”
To date, he has authored three books, including Pope Peter for Catholic Answers Press.
A former practicing attorney in Washington, D.C., Joe received his Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University in 2010 after earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Topeka’s Washburn University.
Joe and his wife, Anna, along with their daughter Stella (and a yet-unnamed unborn baby on the way!) reside in the Kansas City area. In his free time, Joe enjoys reading, listening to podcasts, and tormenting his loved ones with terrible puns.
If you are interested in booking Joe Heschmeyer for an upcoming event, please contact Catholic Answers at (619) 387-7200 x323 or click here for more information.
While at School of Faith, Joe focused primarily on formation for the Kansas City Archdiocese’s elementary and high school teachers. He also spent a year helping to manage the Catholic Spiritual Mentorship program.
Prior to his work at School of Faith, he discerned the priesthood from 2012-17 for the Archdiocese of Kansas City. During that time, he earned both a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis and a baccalaureate degree in sacred theology (S.T.B.) from Rome’s Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum).
A regular contributor to Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers Focus, and Catholic Answers Magazine (print and online) even before joining the apostolate, Joe has blogged at his own “Shameless Popery” website and co-hosted a weekly show called “The Catholic Podcast.”
To date, he has authored three books, including Pope Peter for Catholic Answers Press.
A former practicing attorney in Washington, D.C., Joe received his Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University in 2010 after earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Topeka’s Washburn University.
Joe and his wife, Anna, along with their daughter Stella (and a yet-unnamed unborn baby on the way!) reside in the Kansas City area. In his free time, Joe enjoys reading, listening to podcasts, and tormenting his loved ones with terrible puns.
If you are interested in booking Joe Heschmeyer for an upcoming event, please contact Catholic Answers at (619) 387-7200 x323 or click here for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 17, 2026
Joseph has always been the figure I feel most tenderly toward in the entire Christian tradition.
Not the most dramatic. Not the most theologically contested. Just quietly, persistently there. Holding the child. Protecting the mother. Disappearing from the narrative once the story no longer needs him to be visible.
That hiddenness is the thing that has always undone me a little.
So I came to this book already partial. Already wanting to love it. And largely, I did.
Heschmeyer writes with the clarity and seriousness of someone who has genuinely wrestled with his subject matter rather than simply organised information around it. The book is not long. It does not try to be exhaustive. What it does is return again and again to Scripture and to the earliest Christian witnesses, stripping away centuries of accumulated sentimentality to ask what Joseph actually was. What he actually did. What it cost.
And the section I cannot stop thinking about is the treatment of Mary.
Specifically, her consecration. Her virginity. The theological and scriptural case for a young woman who had already given herself entirely to God before any of this began. Who arrives at her betrothal to Joseph already belonging, in the deepest possible sense, to something else. Something untouchable.
I had encountered this tradition before. But Heschmeyer handles it with a rigour and a tenderness that made it resonate differently for me this time. Because if you accept that reading, if you sit with it seriously, then everything about Joseph shifts.
He is not simply a husband who behaved honourably. He is a man who understood exactly what he was being asked to stand beside. Who said yes to guardianship rather than possession. Who protected a consecration he did not initiate and would never fully comprehend.
That is not a small thing.
That is actually one of the most radical portraits of masculine faithfulness I have encountered in spiritual reading.
My only frustration with the book is that it is too short. I kept wanting more. More depth in certain passages. More time spent in the theological weeds I find so nourishing. The reflection questions at the end of each chapter signal that this was written partly for group study, which is fine, but occasionally you feel the constraints that places on the prose. A kind of careful accessibility where you want something rawer and less contained.
But that is a complaint about appetite rather than quality.
This is a genuinely good book. Rooted without being rigid. Spiritually alive in the way the best Catholic writing is spiritually alive: not performing faith but actually thinking inside it.
Joseph deserves this kind of attention.
He has always deserved it.
Not the most dramatic. Not the most theologically contested. Just quietly, persistently there. Holding the child. Protecting the mother. Disappearing from the narrative once the story no longer needs him to be visible.
That hiddenness is the thing that has always undone me a little.
So I came to this book already partial. Already wanting to love it. And largely, I did.
Heschmeyer writes with the clarity and seriousness of someone who has genuinely wrestled with his subject matter rather than simply organised information around it. The book is not long. It does not try to be exhaustive. What it does is return again and again to Scripture and to the earliest Christian witnesses, stripping away centuries of accumulated sentimentality to ask what Joseph actually was. What he actually did. What it cost.
And the section I cannot stop thinking about is the treatment of Mary.
Specifically, her consecration. Her virginity. The theological and scriptural case for a young woman who had already given herself entirely to God before any of this began. Who arrives at her betrothal to Joseph already belonging, in the deepest possible sense, to something else. Something untouchable.
I had encountered this tradition before. But Heschmeyer handles it with a rigour and a tenderness that made it resonate differently for me this time. Because if you accept that reading, if you sit with it seriously, then everything about Joseph shifts.
He is not simply a husband who behaved honourably. He is a man who understood exactly what he was being asked to stand beside. Who said yes to guardianship rather than possession. Who protected a consecration he did not initiate and would never fully comprehend.
That is not a small thing.
That is actually one of the most radical portraits of masculine faithfulness I have encountered in spiritual reading.
My only frustration with the book is that it is too short. I kept wanting more. More depth in certain passages. More time spent in the theological weeds I find so nourishing. The reflection questions at the end of each chapter signal that this was written partly for group study, which is fine, but occasionally you feel the constraints that places on the prose. A kind of careful accessibility where you want something rawer and less contained.
But that is a complaint about appetite rather than quality.
This is a genuinely good book. Rooted without being rigid. Spiritually alive in the way the best Catholic writing is spiritually alive: not performing faith but actually thinking inside it.
Joseph deserves this kind of attention.
He has always deserved it.
August 16, 2026
"A Man Named Joseph: Guardian for Our Times" by Joe Heschmeyer provides a Biblical and cultural insight into Joseph, spouse of Mary, adoptive father of Jesus. Easy to read with prayer provoking summary questions for each chapter. [4/5]
October 24, 2023
Good intro to St Joseph
March 29, 2025
A good introduction on the life of Saint Joseph. The author does a good job of describing why Joseph is an important figure in both the history of the Catholic Church and in the life of Jesus Christ
April 3, 2026
Audiobook. Great insights and all backed up with cites. Gave me some things to ponder.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews