HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

This episode explores the theory and the practice of the Polis Method of language instruction which relies on a variety of methods to offer students an immersive experience of second language acquisition. We are joined by Dr. Christophe Rico, Dean of the Polis Institute, and Mr. Guillermo Dillon, Latin teacher at the Northridge Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois.

St. John Henry Newmann:

Warfare the Condition of Life

St. Thomas Aquinas on Magnanimity

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3129.htm

In this week's episode, Mr. Michael Moynihan discusses freedom in education. Michael traces the development of our philosophical understanding of freedom through the centuries, starting with the Greeks and moving into the modern age. Next he presents the Christian ideal of freedom as a resolution and expansion of these conflicting understandings, along with some implications of this new freedom for our work in the classroom.

• AlexHavard.com

• Free Hearts: Understanding Your Deepest Motivations
• Created for Greatness: The Power of Magnanimity
• And more...

This week's episode features Chris McKenna, founder and CEO of Protect Young Eyes (ProtectYoungEyes.com), who discusses the challenges and opportunities of raising sons in a digital age. Our guest has been on the frontlines of the current battle to protect children from digital exploitation, both criminal and corporate. As we form sons into men of freedom, it is grossly negligent to lack awareness and plan in this domain. Chris provides both. Listen in to hear more about how parents can flip a challenge into an adventure by accompanying their sons through a digital world where pornography and distraction saturate the landscape. As always, the obstacle becomes the way, and by keeping our sights set on the good while fearlessly walking with our sons, we can rely on grace to help our boys grow into men with hearts capable of profound and lasting love.

For many people today, avoiding existential despair is like shoveling water from a damaged ship: the effort, no matter how valiant, is ultimately futile. Stuck in an immanent frame, a frame which lacks any real transcendence, one is left without a substantial source for hope.

The above remains true, though in different ways, even for believing and practicing Christians. As children of our current culture, that culture shapes even our faith.

This week on HeightsCast, we welcome back Dr. R. J. Snell, the Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute and the editor-in-chief of Public Discourse. In the episode, Dr. Snell discusses his recently published book, Lost in the Chaos, in which he offers an examination of the theological virtue of hope and an application of that virtue to our current times.

More than an optimistic personality trait, more than a virtue that looks forward to a time in which all shall be made right, and more than a nostalgia that pines for a past in which all is thought to have been right, R. J. encourages us to see hope as a supernatural gift whereby we trust now in the agency of God even while evil perdures around us.

Chapters

• 2:55 What is hope?
• 7:30 The "in the end" attitude
• 11:00 Job and hope in the darkness
• 14:00 The metaphysics of despair
• 18:55 Safety-ism
• 21:55 Despair as the desire to disappear
• 24:30 How immanence affects even the believer
• 26:46 Temptations of believers and non-believers
• 31:40 The twin dangers of utopianism and fundamentalism
• 36:35 The small teams and the little flocks
• 42:20 The importance of loving people as they are
• 44:15 Re-evaluating our approach to reason and our capacity to see reality
• 50:50 Expanding reason
• 54:35 Feelings as hooks into reality
• 1:01:00 Towards a more human way of seeing
• 1:02:00 Take-aways
• 1:05:05 A parting blessing

Also on the Forum

Work and Acedia: On Our Original Vocation with R. J. Snell

Leisure and Acedia: On Contemplative Homes in a Frenetic Age with R. J. Snell

This week we feature a lecture offered by Head of Upper School, Michael Moynihan, at the most recent Teaching Vocation Conference. In his presentation, Michael encourages us as teachers to engage our students as free and rational agents, even when they don't want to be engaged as such. Michael offers us some helpful insights into the principles that should guide our teaching, as we lead our students to becoming seekers of truth, rather than consumers of information produced by others.

Many of us assume that college will inevitably follow on high school's heels, but why? Why go to college, and, once there, how do we make the most of the "college experience?" University of Dallas' President, Dr. Jonathan Sanford, shares his thoughts on these questions and offers guidance as to how this experience should be different at a Catholic liberal arts university. Our approach to friendship, study, and reality is shaped by our university years. But so too are our university years shaped by our expectations heading into it. Higher ed is a place where most of us can find whatever it is we are looking for. Dr. Sanford's conversation calibrates our students to make sure they are looking for the right things.

Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente discusses the importance of "imperfect parenting.' Ours is an age of external perfection, but when our son's fail to achieve the standards we set for them, our own anxiety can be the chief obstacle to our boys' thriving. Emotional presence in an imperfect parent facilitates a child's thriving by subsuming him into that of his mother and father. Hear our headmaster explain the importance of "quantity time," and the internal emotional disposition that can make this time a win, even if imperfectly.

While most professions work on an object which is ultimately transient—a doctor, for example, works to heal the body which will ultimately die, an engineer to design a bridge which will deteriorate over time, an entrepreneur to start a business that will likely persist at most a handful of generations—the object of a teacher's work is a human person, whose ultimate destiny is eternity. His work reverberates not only in this life, but echoes into the life to come.

In this way, the work of a teacher is a natural extension of the work of parents, who cooperate with the Creator in not only welcoming souls into their own homes, but in stewarding them back to their heavenly Father's eternal homeland. Indeed, the work of a teacher is essentially an extension of the work of parents, who are the first and primary educators of their children.

To explore the ways the vocation of fatherhood harmonizes with the vocation of teaching, this week on HeightsCast we share a lecture given by Tom Steenson at our recent Teaching Vocation Conference. In his talk, Tom discusses the ways that being a teacher helps one to be a better father, as well as the ways being a father helps one become a better teacher.