Formation Seminar

Our flagship program: intellectual apprenticeship for young men age 14-18. We will read, discuss, and synthesize complex texts in history, philosophy, theology, and literature.

It is appropriate for a man in his 20s to teach a bright teenager. The age difference is close enough to facilitate mutual understanding, but broad enough to ensure that the older man has much to teach the younger. For most of our history, these relationships were a crucial facet of the educational ecology. But they have been mostly lost, since it has become commonplace for men to stay in full-time education later and later into their 20s.

Entering into intellectual mentorship with me, your son will reckon with my perspective on the world, which I have developed through study, experience, work, and conversion, during the 10 years since I was his age. My goal is to prepare him to engage with large, complex books and ideas. Through this program, I will give him the tools to seek mentorship with any of the great minds of history. He will be better able to seek mentorship with C.S. Lewis, St. Basil, Cicero, Pascal, Florensky, or whomever else he should feel a kinship with. My goal is not primarily to fill his head with knowledge, but above all to help him to generate an original, independent intellectual life. This is the program I wish I'd had as a teenager.

Trimester 1: A study of civilization from a sacramental perspective. What is civilization, and what does it make of man? We develop an understanding of grain agriculture, writing, money, and the city itself: coming to terms with their effects on the human person. Deep study of Genesis, Gilgamesh, Homer, and Plato. Marshall McLuhan's media theory: oral traditions, epic poetry, and the transition into writing-based society and thought. An overview of the religious and philosophical landscape into which Christ incarnated.

Trimester 2: Universal history. Deep dives into certain great nations, the stories of their becoming, the ideas that moved them. How did the Franks become the French? How did Rome move East, and where is it now? We will draw heavily on the historical philosophy of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, according to whom, European history since the Great Schism is defined by revolution. The schism itself ("the papal revolution," he calls it) rung in a new age of revolutionary cycles, from the Reformation to the French. We will study some of these revolutions and get a sense of how much we live in their aftermath.

Trimester 3: The classical Trivium: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. Grammar is the shape of existence itself, which we know to be a spoken Word. These cosmic patterns are reflected in the structure of human language, and in the greatest expressions of our literature, some of which we will study. Dialectic, the rhythm of questioning and debate, the art of reconciling contradiction. The relationship of dialectic to the dualism of Asian philosophy. What is the role of dualism and dialectic? Our society is oversaturated with dialectic. Yet there are true dialectics: man and woman, being and non-being, God and the world, even the 1s and 0s which make all of our computers run. Finally, Rhetoric, the art of speech which unites. Storytelling, persuasion, even sales — rhetoric is about kairos: timely speech, spoken at the right time and in the right way, with the object of uniting people in a shared life. We will develop a theology and sociology of speech.