HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

It's not merely where you are going, but how you get there, that matters. And as we often find ourselves going places in cars, it is worth stopping to consider how we spend our car rides.

In this week's episode, we welcome back to the podcast Mr. Kyle Blackmer for a discussion of the daily commute. Whether we carpool or ride solo, Mr. Blackmer helps us to reframe how we approach this daily endeavor which can easily become, at best, dead time and, at worst, dreaded time.

Kyle shows us how the car, with the right attitude and a little creativity, can become its own classroom. He encourages us to think about how we can best use this time by praying, engaging in good conversation—at times mere fun, at other times more formative–, listening to good music and books, and celebrating.

Chapters

• 00:45 Introduction: reframing the daily commute
• 3:20 How can we make carpooling more fruitful for our sons?
• 5:43 The car as a classroom: the first and last period of the day
• 6:22 Four modes of teaching in the Car
• 6:45 Prayer, especially the Rosary, especially in the morning
• 9:28 Car as a place for friendship, shared life
• 10:55 Conversation in cars
• 16:20 The art of asking good questions and listening
• 17:15 Tuning into the boys in front of you
• 19:16 Setting guidelines for your carpool
• 21:10 Being intentional about what you listen to
• 25:35 Audiobooks and classic rock
• 27:50 Celebrating the in little ways
• 31:20 Finding moments for little points of correction
• 33:30 Advice for solo commuters
• 35:50 The last three minutes: preparing for your return home

Recommended Audiobooks for the Road

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Seabiscuit by Charles Rivers Editors

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Treasury for Children by James Herriot

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingallas Wilder

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

The Complete Father Brown Collection by G.K. Chesterton

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

Also on the Forum

On Home as Social Hub: The Importance of Hosting Our Sons and Their Friends with Tom Royals

Friendship for Fathers: John Cuddeback on Living and Teaching the Art with John Cuddeback

Sarah Mackenzi on the Read-Aloud Family with Sarah Mackenzi

In a recent national survey of adults in America, a striking sixty-one percent of young adults (age 18-25) reported feeling serious loneliness. Such feelings of loneliness were also accompanied by anxiety and depression. Although humans are by nature social animals, it would seem that forming deep friendships may not always come so naturally.

How do we form friendships? How do we help our sons form friendships? What even is friendship?

To help us answer these questions, we welcome to HeightsCast John Cuddeback, professor of philosophy at Christendom College and Life Craft writer and speaker. In this episode, Professor Cuddeback helps us understand what friendship is, how to practice the art of friendship, and how friendship goes hand-in-hand with happiness. As he explains, friendships do not merely happen. Rather, they require intentional cultivation and sustained effort. Indeed, like any art, the art of friendship requires discipline and practice. Specifically, Professor Cuddeback focuses our attention on how a husband can form a deep friendship with his wife and a few male friends, as well as how he can help his children to grow in their own friendships. Being a father first, he may one day become a friend of his adult children.

As Professor Cuddeback explains, true friendship is the only way to overcome loneliness in life. And, in the end, it will be in sharing our lives with friends that we come to find the ultimate meaning of our lives.

Chapters

• 1:25 What is friendship?
• 4:15 Different kinds of friendship
• 9:05 Friendship and human flourishing
• 11:05 Happiness today
• 14:00 The activities of friendship
• 19:40 The number of friends
• 24:40 Friendship for the twenty-first century father
• 28:00 Selecting friends
• 33:30 Friendship with your spouse
• 41:10 Friendship with other men
• 44:30 How to prioritize relationships
• 47:15 Parenting and friendship
• 50:47 How to coach our children in forming friendships
• 55:37 Advice and encouragement for single mothers

Resources

Life-Craft.org

True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness by John Cuddeback

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx

Treatise on Law by Thomas Aquinas

Also on The Forum

Cultivating Friendship in the Classroom by Austin Hatch

On Friendship after Senior Year: Higher Stakes and Beautiful Opportunities with Dave Maxham

Friendship for the 21st Century Boy with Alvaro de Vicente

On Home as Social Hub: The Importance of Hosting Our Sons and Their Friends with Tom Royals

With another year having passed—perhaps even sped by—and a new one underfoot, HeightsCast returns with a discussion of time and solitude with Mike Ortiz and Rob Greving. Together, Mike and Rob invite us to slow down as they unpack their two recently published articles on the Forum.

Mr. Ortiz dives into Henry David Thoreau's cabin life and the importance of intentional times of solitude in our lives, while Mr. Greving considers our often uneasy relationship with time and the good of slowing down, even as the world speeds up.

As we look forward to the new year with hope and anticipation, let us not forget to slow down and, in Mr. Greving's words, listen for the present moment. After all, you can't read a poem in a hurry. And if you are always in a hurry, you might miss the poetry of life.

• 1:45 Background to the articles
• 5:43 Thoreau's way of solitude: the path to a greater appreciation of the world
• 10:15 Never less alone than when alone
• 13:30 Time alone and listening for God
• 15:55 Silence and the capacity to attend
• 20:55 Having more that is worth less
• 22:55 Handling time gently
• 30:08 Times of leisure in the life of a school
• 32:30 Beyond life hacks: cultivating a disposition
• 40:56 Poetry, solitude, and time
• 45:13 You can't read a poem in a hurry
• 48:02 Slowing down in family life
• 53:00 The importance of not over-scheduling kids
• 57:15 Conclusion and a closing poem

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The World of Silence by Max Picard

Living in Liturgical Time by Terence Sweeney

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost

"Mossbawn": Two Poems in Dedication by Seamus Heaney

Thoreau's Cabin Life: Why It's Not Anti-Social to Savor Solitude by Mike Ortiz

Handling Time Gently by Rob Greving

The Freedom to Form Bonds: Kevin Majeres on Mindfulness and Attention with Kevin Majeres

Forming Deep Workers with Cal Newport

What Is the Difference between Free Time and Leisure? by Joe Bissex

From the very start, the founders of The Heights understood education to consist in the communication of a culture. As culture often enters a boy's mind through his senses, an important means of this transmission is the art and architecture of a school. Indeed, in many ways buildings embody the ideals of an institution.

This week Joe Cardenas, head of mentoring and long-time art history teacher, joins us for a conversation on the importance of beauty in education. Rooting the conversation in the American tradition, Joe helps us see why and how the art and architecture of schools is as important as the books in its curriculum.

As we hear from Joe, the art on a school's walls become the images adorning a student's soul. If we want to help our boys be at home in their very selves, the art of schools is an indispensable means to this end.

Chapters

• 1:25 An evening of art for parents at The Hawthorn School
• 4:40 Art and beauty in the American tradition
  • 5:35 Washington's leadership at Valley Forge
• 7:23 Why does beauty matter?
  • 9:00 The museum of our soul and the archive of our experiences
• 10:43 What is the role of beauty in a school building?
• 14:13 Pope Benedict XVI on Beauty
• 16:00 Cardinal Newman on Beauty
• 17:22 Beauty and the daily reality of boys
• 21:25 Beauty in business
• 24:00 Robert Jackson and the early years of The Heights
• 28:30 Churchill's speech on rebuilding the House of Commons

Additional Resources

Adoremus.org's explanation of the Four Seasonal Marian Anthems (includes history and translation)

PDF of Music and Lyrics to Alma Redemtoris Mater from gregorian-chant-hymns.com

Speech on the Rebuilding of the House of Commons by Winston Churchill

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty by Joseph Ratzinger

A Catholic Eton? by Paul Shrimpton

Also on the Forum

School Tone, the Most Powerful Teacher with Alvaro de Vicente

Building Little Houses: Why Random Art Projects Are Awesome by Joe Bissex

Manners: The Art of Happiness by Robert Greving

Why Our Politics Needs Poetry with Dr. Matthew Mehan

Five Fruits of a Poetic Education by Nate Gadiano

In many schools, education is understood in reductively intellectual terms. The point of teaching, it would seem, is merely to inform, to fill the mind with data, to train the intellect to perform tasks and solve puzzles. To be sure, information and intellectual virtues are essential aspects of education; but they are not the whole, and to make them so would be to reduce the person to his mind.

In this talk, taken from our recent Art of Teaching Conference, Anton Vorozhko helps us understand the role of the heart in the education of the whole human person. Starting with a reflection on the greatest of teachers, Christ—the one to whom all other teachers ought ultimately to point—Anton offers advice at once practical and personal. His talk centers on three areas, or apostolates, which he suggests teachers should consider: presence, correction, and prayer.

In the end, considering these three apostolates will help teachers turn their daily work into what St. John Henry Newman called a cor ad cor loquitur—a heart speaking unto heart—making his task not only to inform the mind but equally to move the heart.

Chapters

• 0:05 Other men are teaching!
• 1:00 Looking to the ultimate models: Our Lord and many of the saints
• 3:40 The dream of Don Bosco and the Preventive System
• 7:20 Conquer through love: seeing Christ in our classroom
• 10:03 Not a job, a vocation
• 11:24 Three apostolates of the teacher: presence, correction, prayer
• 11:40 Apostolate of presence
• 15:30 Apostolate of correction
• 17:48 Suggestions from Don Bosco
• 19:05 Apostolate of prayer
• 21:45 St. John Paul II as a university professor

Additional Resources

Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco: From St. John Bosco's Biographical Memoirs by St. John Bosco

Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel

Also on The Forum

The Art of Teaching: On Forming Contemplative Souls with Rich Moss

Developing Your Son's Will with Andy Reed

The Freedom to Form Bonds: Kevin Majeres on Mindfulness and Attention with Dr. Kevin Majeres

The Talk and Beyond with Michael Moynihan

In this episode, we feature a recorded lecture given by Rich Moss in his introductory presentation at the Art of Teaching conference hosted by The Heights Forum last week. In this talk, Rich explains why teaching is an art, what that art is, and what are the tools utilized by the teaching artist.

Boys love concrete details and, even more, they love when those concrete details form the fabric of a hero's tale. Indeed, as Aristotle himself knew, better than telling adolescents merely about virtue is giving them examples of heroes, for good men are not made in theory, but in practice and boys need to see virtues practiced to be inspired themselves.

What better place to turn than an author who has taught generations of leaders, not least of which were our own country's founders. That man is Plutarch and our guide is Tom Cox, one of the architects of the eighth grade core humanities class and current upper school classics teacher.

In this episode, Mr. Cox shows why and how we teach Plutarch to our boys. He explains why it is important to find the good even in heroes that are less than saints and helps us understand that education is more than something that merely happens; it requires a boy's freedom.

Although heroes may not be saints, they are good starting points. It is perhaps not mere happenstance that Plutarch wrote his biographies as the Evangelists were writing their lives of life's Author. As the Greek philosopher was a master at portraying those little details which form a hero's character, it is the man from Nazareth who teaches us to turn them into heroic verse—and that is the beginning of holiness.

Chapters

• 1:15 How did you find Plutarch?
  • The eighth grade core
  • A biographical approach to history
• 4:20 Why read Plutarch?
  • A good storyteller
  • An inspiration to Shakespeare
• 6:10 What does Plutarch tell us about being a good man?
  • The peak of a mountain of tradition
  • Seeing the goodness first: heroes and saints
• 13:10 What are some of the best lives to take a look at?
  • Alcibiades
  • Mark Antony Publius
  • Cicero
  • Cato the Younger
• 19:54 Connecting pieces of the curriculum with Plutarch
  • Government and Literature
  • 20:20 Gospels
• 22:35 On the formation of leaders
  • 24:20 Connecting to the American leadership
• 28:10 Plutarch and the education of citizens
• 33:04 Where to start?
  • Alexander the Great and Pompey
  • Brutus and Caesar
• 36:09 How to teach Plutarch
  • Difficulty of translations
  • A little at a time
• 38:15 The Plutarch Podcast and Grammaticus.co

Additional Resources

The Plutarch Podcast

Grammaticus.co

Lives by Plutarch

Also on The Forum

Writing and Thought; Oratory and Ethics: What we Give Our 7th Graders in the Core with Tom Cox

History the Way It Was… And the Way It Should Be by Mark Grannis

Aristotle on the Student's Job by Tom Cox

Seneca on the Teacher's Job by Tom Cox

This week on HeightsCast, we feature headmaster Alvaro de Vicente's open house speech on the mission and vision of The Heights School. In the speech, Alvaro helps parents discern the right school for their son. Understanding education to be essentially about partnering with parents to transmit a culture, he encourages parents to thoughtfully consider the culture of our school and how it relates to the culture of their own homes. In addition, Mr. de Vicente offers a few words on our vision of manhood, suggesting that to be a good man, one must also be quite dangerous: powerful enough to do damage, but with the moral character to do great things.

Chapters

• 1:17 How to discern the right school for your son
• 1:45 Education as transmission of culture
• 2:46 Our vision
  • 3:20 Dangerously good: what it means to be a man
  • 6:15 Our goal
• 6:50 How to make this vision a reality
  • 6:57 Partnership with parents
  • 8:35 Growth in virtue
  • 11:40 Model the culture and counsel your sons

Additional Resources

Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag by Armando Valladares

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Also on The Forum

The Man Fully Alive with Alvaro de Vicente

Self-Mastery: Alvaro de Vicente on Fostering Interior Freedom in Schools with Alvaro de Vicente

Who Am I?: The Question of Persona with Alvaro de Vicente

Our Little Protectors: How Do WE See Our Boys? with Alvaro de Vicente

Forming Wise, Courageous Risk-Takers with Alvaro de Vicente

This week on HeightsCast, we feature a recording of the 2022 Headmaster's Lecture on the man fully alive. In this lecture, Mr. Alvaro de Vicente helps us understand what we mean when we use St. Irenaeus' oft-quoted though seldom understood words that gloria Dei est vivens homo: the glory of God is living man.

Mr. de Vicente shares his thoughts on the destination and the road ahead, suggesting that to live fully on earth we must understand that the fullness of life is found only in heaven. And if we are to reach this destination which is our destiny, we should see this life as practice for the next.

In particular, he offers three actions that are the best practice for heaven:

1. To play
2. To see
3. To commit

Taking us through each of these, Mr. de Vicente helps us to approach life in a playful way, taking ourselves lightly and others seriously; to discover the beauty of the world, contemplating with loving eyes and a grateful heart; and to commit fully, passionately persevering in our love for others. Our boys will not live these ideals perfectly—we will not live them perfectly—but if together we begin and begin again often, we will be well on the way; and that will be a taste of heaven.

Chapters

• 2:43 Origins of the tagline "Men fully alive"
• 4:01 Man fully alive: what does this mean?
  • 4:14 Common notions
  • 5:18 Man as the masterpiece of God
  • 7:56 What is man?
  • 9:01 Crisis of masculinity: either brutes or wimps
• 9:45 Life on earth as a preparation for heaven
  • 11:07 What is heaven?
  • 12:36 Practice for heaven
  • 13:16 A man with a mission
• 16:31 To play
  • 16:33 Physical play
  • 19:06 Approaching life in a playful way
  • 22:31 A game with two halves
• 26:09 To see
  • 27:56 Blindness as an illness of the soul
  • 29:36 The Little Prince and our inability to see beauty
  • 30:54 When the truth complicates my life
  • 32:48 Who you are and what you are here for
  • 33:32 On contemplation
    • 34:36 Finding beauty
    • 36:47 Life as a museum
    • 37:21 Seeing with the mind's eye
    • 39:41 Seeing with the heart
• 41:33 To commit
  • 42:11 The man in a wheelchair
  • 43:40 Closing doors
  • 45:20 On the passions
  • 48:01 Commitment is different from a self-help book
  • 48:41 Screwtape on love and marriage
  • 51:58 Faithfulness over time is the name of love (Benedict XVI)
  • 52:41 The danger of overcommitting
• 54:26 Conclusion

Also on The Forum

Foundations of Hope: Raising Optimistic Men Fully Alive with Alvaro de Vicente

The Education of "Men Fully Alive": The Mission and Vision of The Heights with Alvaro de Vicente

Who Am I?: The Question of Persona with Alvaro de Vicente

Our Little Protectors: How Do WE See Our Boys? with Alvaro de Vicente

Forming Wise, Courageous Risk-Takers with Alvaro de Vicente

In Defense of Victory by Kyle Blackmer

Additional Resources

Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus

In this week's episode, we discuss science fiction with Mr. Joe Breslin, fifth grade teacher and soon-to-be published author of Other Minds: 13 Tales of Wonder and Sorrow. Surveying the wide umbrella of literature and film termed "sci-fi," Mr. Breslin helps us understand what makes this genre of literature valuable, interesting, and beautiful.

As Mr. Breslin explains, science fiction done well offers a celebration of the human person, showing us in often strange ways what is possible for us as thinking beings. Moreover, by removing us from the humdrum of our ordinary lives and instilling a sense of awe as we experience another world, science fiction can provide new insights into old problems, helping us rediscover the wonder of our own everyday lives. And this is often much needed–for although our world may never be lacking in wonders, we may at times find our weary selves lacking in the wonder to see it.

Chapters

• 1:40 What is science fiction?
  • 2:20 Science fiction vs. fantasy
  • 4:30 Kinds of science fiction
    • Space opera
    • Hard sci-fi
    • Dystopia
    • Post-apocalyptic
    • Steampunk
    • Military
    • Horror
    • Classic
• 11:30 Insights from different genres
• 13:03 Personal favorites of Mr. Breslin
• 16:10 Why is science fiction valuable?
  • 17:37 Perception vs. reality
  • 18:27 Anthropology through another lens
  • 19:19 Science fiction as a humanistic kind of literature
• 22:13 Challenges of writing science fiction
• 28:45 Mr. Breslin's own writing
  • 30:30 A common thread: strange encounters
  • 32:32 Self-publishing
  • 34:35 Good fiction infused with Faith
• 38:38 Why read science fiction?
  • 40:25 A caveat: the danger of focusing on man under a single aspect
  • 42:43 Literature: utility and enjoyment
• 44:50 Learn more about Mr. Breslin's work

Also on The Forum

Modern Literature: On Curating the Contemporary with Michael Ortiz

Guiding Our Boys through Modern Literature with Joe Breslin and Lionel Yaceczko

Exploring and Expressing the Human Condition through Literature with Michael Ortiz

Forum Reviews

Additional Resources

Joey Breslin Writes, Mr. Breslin's writing website