Life of the Mind: Brookewood & Avalon Schools

In this episode, Fr. José, Brookewood chaplain and teacher, and I talk about the diaries of Etty Hillesum.  Hillesum was in her 20s in the Netherlands when she wrote her diary about her external experience during the Nazi occupation and more importantly about her internal experience of God.  

David Booz and Andrea Francois join me for a discussion of Professor Yascha Mounk's new book, The Identity Trap.  We talk about what we learned from reading Mounk's history of identity politics from Foucault to Ibram X. Kendi, and we discuss Mounk's conclusions about the promotion of universal values.  Mounk's book is significant in part because he comes to the discussion from the left.  We find plenty to agree with him about, even as we wish he had gone further in acknowledging the Source of the values he touts.

In this episode, I talk with Mrs. Ann Vitz, longtime Brookewood parent and new Brookewood teacher, about her program, Great Moral Stories, which we're implementing in grades K-12 this year.  Based on Core Virtues by Mary Beth Klee, and designed with Aristotle's virtues as its foundation, this curriculum is helping Brookewood girls to learn more about how to live a virtuous life.  Here's the article Ann and I reference, the piece by Andrea Francois.  

Today I talk with Rich McPherson, Head of Brookewood and President of Avalon and Brookewood, to learn how he spent his summer vacation.  Having made a number of one-day pilgrimages and thought for a long time about multi-day routes, Rich has devised a two-week pilgrimage, a Camino of Maryland, he hopes to initiate this next summer, with the help of many pastors and other community members along the way.  While I kept calling it "Rich's Camino" all summer, he kept correcting me:  "It's God's Camino," he said. And, indeed, as Rich finds the doors opening to him and the various outpourings of support along the way, it does seem to be a project helped along by the Holy Spirit.  Listen to Rich talk about it and see if you are inspired to join.

David, Andrea, and I (with improved audio) sit down to discuss two works by Josef Pieper.  These two works are both important and accessible to non-philosophers.  In Leisure, Pieper posits that real leisure relies on a capacity for contemplation and is anchored in divine worship.  In "Hope," Pieper highlights our status as pilgrims "on the way" in our earthly lives and develops the implications of that status viator in interesting and life-changing ways.

In Episode 16, I'm joined by Andrea Francois and David Booz to discuss the Hungarian Lazlo Foldenyi's collection of essays.  We talk about the title essay, the problems Foldenyi finds with Enlightenment rationalism, and the problem of the cultural erasure of God.  Foldenyi explores his set of issues by/while looking at various answers offered by Romanticism and by Modernism, Surrealism, and so on.  Foldenyi is interested in visual art, theatre, and literature.  This is a longer podcast, and it gets better as we go.

Fellow Upper School English teacher Liz Eames and I discuss the New Yorker article "The End of the English Major."  We explore the phenomenon, its causes, and general trends in our culture, along with shifts in university education, that take people away from serious literary study.  Placing English in the center of one's education allows for increased empathy, safe places to think through and act out different futures, greater self-awareness, the companionship of stories and poems--and, yes, jobs, too!

We've noticed a trend away from giving (high school) midyear and final exams--a shift we saw before Covid and see post-Covid--yet we still give exams.  An exam is a good educational tool that helps students synthesize material and it's good college prep as well.  Listen to David Booz, Shannon Garvey, and Liz Eames talk with me about their exam practices and how they contribute to the project of a sound high school education in which both content and skills are important.

Poet Sally Rosen Kindred (sometime Brookewood guest and judge for the Joseph W. McPherson Poetry Contest) and I talk about poetry in general, poetry memorization, poetry and growing up, and teaching poetry.  Then, Sally reads selections from her award-winning 3rd collection Where the Wolf, from Diode Editions.  I am sorry that my audio is a little weird on this one;  I think this is one of the best of the podcast conversations.

Avalon head Kevin Davern and Brookewood teacher (and longtime Avalon-Brookewood teacher/administrator and parent) John Acevedo join me to talk about chivalry in the 21st century.  I sound like some anthropological NPR reporter for a while, but then Kevin, John, and I talk about John Eldredge's book Wild at Heart, which takes an evangelical approach to discuss the roles of adventure, quest, and rescue in a man's life.