Life of the Mind: Brookewood & Avalon Schools Cherie Walsh

Podcast regular David Booz joins me to talk about Erik Varden's The Shattering of Loneliness:  On Christian Remembrance.  When a friend gave me this book as a present, I thought she felt sorry for me, but once I got past the title, I found a deeply insightful, rich, accessible treatment of God's commands regarding memory.  David says this book changed his life.  Our conversation includes Andrei Makine, Stig Dagerman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vassily Grossman, Gustav Mahler, Maïti Girtanner, and more.  

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.