What Happens When Wisdom Is Recovered

Descripción

What Happens When Wisdom is Recovered I want to tell you about a former adult student of mine. I'll call him Mike. Mike came to me several years ago. He was a retired professional in his fifties, successful, and genuinely intelligent. He was fairly well read, politically engaged. He kept up with the news. He thought of himself as an educated person, and by every conventional measure, he was. But he came to me with something he couldn't quite name. He described it as a sense of intellectual and spiritual restlessness, perhaps a mild state of acedia, but closer to his words, a feeling that for all his education and all his success in life, left him feeling oddly empty. Mike was full of trivia, facts, and information; and yet, he was somehow starving spiritually and intellectually. He could discuss almost any current event or political policy with confidence but almost none of the deeper questions with any certainty at all. There was more to Mike’s struggle that included his parents’ history and how that influenced his thoughts about his own identity; and so we read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity together. I would have normally started with St. Augustine’s Confessions but due to some of the details surrounding his personal circumstances, we started with someone whom we could still rightly qualify as a native of Old Western Culture but was also more contemporary; and that suited his particular needs. We read Lewis together—him for the very first time—and every week for nearly a year, we met for a deep and candid conversation. He was transformed by the experience and repeatedly expressed his surprise for the way Lewis’s insights manifested the entire Christian intellectual tradition and somehow touched on just about everything he felt was wrong with him. What Lewis knew—what the entire classical Christian tradition has known—is that the human soul has a specific shape. That it is ordered toward particular goods. That when the loves are disordered, when the attention is fragmented, when the imagination is malnourished, the result is not only intellectual poverty but emotional disorientation and spiritual malnutrition. I have to be sensitive with the details for a number of reasons, but Mike became a Christian, was baptized, and continued to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inside and outside the Church. It was a marvelous transformation to behold. Living in this postmodern era, it’s almost certain that you know more than you can use. A lot of people tend to feel more than they can interpret and long for something they cannot name. And what the Christian humanists of the past two millennia knew is that this condition is a perennial human conundrum; and it’s fixable. It takes some deep personal reflection and humility, but it’s genuinely fixable. What I want to tell you about today is what actually changes in a person who recovers a robust reading life, not just the Greatest Book, the Bible, but also the great books, the best that has been thought and written for the past two millennia. The first thing that changes is attention. Most of us have lost the capacity for what Josef Pieper called genuine leisure—not idleness, not entertainment, but the receptive stillness in which the soul can actually receive what is being offered to it. When you rebuild the kind of reading habit I’m talking about—a slow, deliberate engagement with the right texts—you recover this capacity. Students tell me, consistently, that within a few weeks of disciplined reading, their ability to concentrate on everything else improves dramatically, including their work, their conversations, and even their prayer life. The second thing that changes is what Edmund Burke called the moral imagination—your capacity to perceive and respond to goodness, truth, and beauty as real but transcendental things. Christian thinkers from Erasmus to C. S. Lewis have emphatically argued that great literature trains the emotions as well as the intellect: Lectio transit in mores (Reading shapes moral character). It gives us categories of feeling adequate to the reality we inhabit. When that faculty is cultivated, a person begins to see differently. You read a passage of Scripture and something opens. You hear a piece of music and it means something it didn't mean before. You make decisions with a kind of clarity you didn't know you had. The third thing that changes is perhaps the most surprising: community. The reading life is not solitary. The great Christian humanists, Augustine, Erasmus, Thomas More, and C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings, all understood that wisdom is formed in conversation. When you find yourself in a room—even a virtual room—with others who are asking the same questions, reading the same texts, wrestling with the same ideas, something happens that cannot happen alone. You discover you are not the only one who has felt this restlessness. You discover the tradition is much richer than you knew. And you discover, often with some relief, that you are not too late. In a few days I'm going to share with you the specific structure—the six weeks, the texts, the assignments, the community—of The Christian Humanist Reading Life. I'm going to show you exactly what we'll do together, how it works, and why this particular sequence is designed to produce lasting change rather than a temporary burst of intellectual enthusiasm. Before then, I'd love to know: what would change for you if you had a genuinely ordered intellectual life? What would be different about your marriage, your parenting, your work, your faith? Leave your answer below. I'm asking seriously; I want to know. I'll respond to as many as I can. More soon. Thanks for reading BOOKS AND LETTERS! If it resonated with you, please press the ❤️ button and share it with a friend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Course, the Structure, and the Book

The Course, the Structure, and the Book In the first two videos I told you about the crisis [https://open.substack.com/pub/scottpostma/p/the-crisis-and-the-invitation?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web]: the profound impoverishment of wisdom in our modern age that afflicts even the most educated people in our society. And, I also talked about what actually changes in a person [https://open.substack.com/pub/scottpostma/p/what-happens-when-wisdom-is-recovered?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web] who recovers the reading life of a Christian Humanist. Today I want to show you exactly what we are going to do together over six weeks. First, I want to dispel a myth I suspect is sitting in the back of your mind. You have tried making reading lists before. You purchased the books. You started journaling, but somewhere around the second or third week, life intervened and the whole project faded away. You thought you’d pick it back up again when life slowed down; but that never happened. You may feel that you’re not disciplined enough, that you lack commitment. What you lacked was the right structure, the right community, and a guide who had been down this road before and knew where the pitfalls were. That’s exactly what The Christian Humanist Reading Life [https://buy.stripe.com/dRm6oG7as6SJatWc9o5wI00] provides. The backbone of this course is my brand new book, Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation. Becoming Classically Educated is a collection of essays I have spent years writing, edited into a single volume by Roman Roads Press [https://romanroadspress.com/] for release next month. It is the most personal argument I have ever made for what classical Christian education actually is, why it matters now, and how an ordinary adult can begin to inhabit the tradition. Every student in the cohort will work through this book with me, week by week, examined as a series of provocations toward, and pathways into, the Great Tradition. Most of what you read will be the essays themselves. Some weeks I will supply you with a supplementary text from one of the greats (i.e., Augustine, Lewis, Pieper, Sertillanges, etc.) to deepen the conversation. But the spine of the course is my book, and you will be the first to explore it—with the author as your guide. Here is how the six weeks work. Week One: What Is a Human Being For? We begin with the question every other question is going to be built on. What kind of creature is a human being, and what is he for? Drawing on the opening essays of Becoming Classically Educated, we’ll trace the answer the classical and Christian tradition has given for two and a half millennia: that human beings are made in the image of God for wisdom, virtue, and the knowledge of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Week one is the anthropological foundation of everything that follows, and getting it right will set the stage for everything else. Week Two: Live Not by Lies: Truth, the Logos, and the Life of the Mind Modern distraction is not, as they say, a flaw, but a feature. It is a carefully engineered condition. So is modern relativism. In week two, we’ll take up the essay “Toward a More Certain Knowledge of the Truth” and ask what it means to build an intellectual life on the conviction that Truth is not a set of propositions to be mastered but a Person to be known. Together, we will build a daily reading rule—a systematic and sustainable rhythm—and you will discover that reading is not just an amusing activity but something Josef Pieper called an act of genuine leisure: a form of receptive presence that makes wisdom possible. Week Three: Ordering the Loves St. Augustine’s great insight is that sin is not primarily the doing of “bad things,” but it can even be the loving of good things in the wrong order. Thus, real education is the reordering of the loves. This week works through the longest and most ambitious essay in the book, tracing the concept of the good from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine’s ordo amoris to the contemporary distortions of self-actualization and therapeutic happiness. This is also the most personally confronting week of the six. You’ll map your actual loves against your intended loves, and you will begin to see clearly where formation is needed. Week Four: Words Create Worlds: Language, Beauty, and the Liberating Arts I’ve emphasized this before, but classical education is, at its root, a language-centered education. What do I mean by that? I mean words are instruments of communication, yes; but, more importantly, they are, in the deepest sense, constitutive of reality. Drawing on “Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds” and “Toward a Recovery of Beauty,” we will explore the way in which the liberal arts are more than an ornament on the edifice of education; rather the liberal arts are the foundation, the very disciplines by which a human being learns to perceive truth, love goodness, and recognize beauty as objective realities and not private preferences. Week Five: Into the Great Conversation We demystify the Great Books and I walk you through how to actually read difficult texts. How to read closely and be changed by them. You will do a guided close reading of a central text, like Plato or Dante, alongside a Christian humanist like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, or Flannery O’Connor on literature as formation. That way we can experience the primary means by which the soul is trained to see goodness and beauty as real. In week five, you learn to read with your whole person, not just your intellect. Week Six: A Rule of Life for the Christian Humanist The course concludes with a commission. Drawing on the book’s essays on science, justice, and history, we will turn from personal formation to applied judgment; and, from there to your own vocation. You will leave with a personal Rule of Life: a document that defines your daily reading practice, your weekly intellectual disciplines, your community of conversation, and the texts you will pursue in the months ahead. I’m not just going to pump you up with inspiration; I will help you create a personal plan. Each week includes a ninety-minute live session with me (e.g., discussions, teachings, questions, etc.), plus a short written assignment designed to move the ideas from your head into your life. The assignments are not academic exercises, per se. They are more formation practices. You will also have access to a private community space where the conversation continues between sessions. There you can share what you are reading, ask questions, and discover that you are not alone in any of this. In closing, let me be completely honest with you. This course will not give you everything! Six weeks is just enough time to reorient your attention, recover your love of serious reading, enter the Great Conversation, and build a sustainable Rule of Life. It is not enough to exhaust the tradition, obviously. You won’t finish all the great books or complete your personal formation. No course could do that. What it will do is give you the foundation, the practice, the community, and a book I hope you’ll return to for years as you continue the long work of personal transformation well after the six weeks are over. The good news is that the tradition is inexhaustible. If you finish this course and want to go deeper—and most of us nerds (I mean students) do—there will be an opportunity for an advanced cohort, an ongoing community, and continued work together. But that comes later. Right now, the question is whether you are ready to take the bull by the horns and begin. In tomorrow’s video, I am going to tell you how to join the cohort, what the investment is, and why I am limiting this first cohort to just 13 students. I will also answer the three objections I hear most often: “I don’t have the time,” “I am not academic enough,” and “I have tried this before and it didn’t stick.” Watch for the video. And in the meantime, if you have a question about the course, about my new book, Becoming Classically Educated, or about whether this course is right for you, please leave it below. I will answer you, personally.Thanks for reading BOOKS AND LETTERS! If it resonated with you, please press the ❤️ button and share it with a friend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

29 de may de 202610 min

Lesson 5 - Easing Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition

Lesson 5:bEasing Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition in 15 Minutes A Day In lesson 5, I want to address a final matter essential to this whole series of lessons, the education of the parents or adults. In the first place, I don’t think it’s wise for parents who are educating their children classically to neglect the tradition themselves. Of course, it’s understandable that many parent who have begun educating their children classically, did not receive the same education themselves. But that’s not a reason to neglect it’s pursuit. You’ll do better by your own children by shoring up your own education. In the second place, I found most parents agree with me on this but struggle to remedy their situation. This is something I hear constantly from intelligent, well-intentioned adults who are drawn to the classical tradition but haven't found their way in. These are adults, often parents, who say to me something to the effect: As I listen in on my child’s class discussions, I realize I missed out on reading most of these books. Or, our dinner table conversations have been the highlight of my day ever since my child began pursuing a classical Christian education. I only wish I had received this kind of education; but, it’s too late for me. For most parents, the obstacle to their own entry is not laziness or a lack of interest. It’s most often one of two things, sometimes both: time constraints and intimidation. The Great Books sound impressive and feel inaccessible. Homer. Socrates. Plato. Augustine. Dante. Aquinas. Just their very names seem to carry so much weight, and sometimes if feel like too much weight. The moment you pick up the Confessions or the Republic and encounter the first page, something in you says: I am not equipped for this. This is for scholars. This is for people who were trained for this. This is not for me. But let me tell you something. That’s just not true. The voice in your head telling you that is lying to you. These texts were not written for academics. They were written for human beings. Plato wrote dialogues, conversations between people wrestling with real questions, because he wanted philosophy to be accessible to anyone capable of honest thought. St. Augustine wrote the Confessions as a prayer, as an outpouring of his restless soul toward God, because he wanted every restless soul to recognize itself in his soul. C. S. Lewis wrote for the common reader because he believed that the common reader was capable of uncommon thought if only given the right invitation. The literature of the Western tradition is not meant to be some kind of fortress. It’s literally meant to be a door, a door into the human condition, and a door that swings inward into your own soul. I’m going to riff off of something Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard University, said about his famous five-foot bookshelf. The five-foot book shelf was a kind of metaphor for what later became the collection of books known as the Harvard Classics. Eliot opined that a working man could acquire a liberal arts education by reading for just fifteen minutes a day from a five-foot bookshelf filled with the best of Western classic literature. So drawing from this, let me share how you can Ease Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition in just 15 Minutes A Day Start with a single text. Not a book list, not a commentary, not a curriculum guide, just one single text. The temptation when you discover the Great Books is to make an ambitious reading plan covering everything you've missed. My encouragement would be to resist this. Pick one book and begin. My recommendation for most adults who are new to this tradition is Augustine's Confessions. It’s personal, emotionally honest, and theologically rich. It requires no prior knowledge of philosophy or Latin. It’s only requirement is a willingness to be humble, a willingness to sit at the feet of St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and let him speak to you. Next, read slowly, slower than you think you need to. Since grade school, we have been trained to skim and scan. Newspapers were formatted and printed with this in mind. And in recent decades, we’ve been further conditioned by screens to scan for information, to extract the key point, maybe summarize it, and then move on. That mode of reading will not serve you well for our purpose here. These texts reward close reading, restful, contemplative, lingering reading. Read a paragraph. Stop. Ask the author what he means, what he is claiming. Then ask why. Then ask about the implications of his meaning. Finally, ask yourself whether or not you agree. Then why or why not? Read it again. In fifteen minutes, reading this way, you will cover perhaps a page or two. That is just fine. Keep a commonplace book( i.e., a florilegium, or something the Italians called the Zibaldone). While each of these tended toward a slightly different purpose historically, what I mean by a commonplace book is simply a notebook in which you copy out passages that strike you, passages that arrest your attention, quotes or statements that seem important, thoughts that you want to return to or perhaps memorize. The practice of writing out a passage by hand does something that highlighting cannot do: it slows you down, makes you engage the exact words, and imprints the idea more deeply on your mind. One additional benefit is after six months of commonplacing, you will have a personal anthology of the tradition's most powerful moments, written in your own hand. Fourth, find one other person to read with you. I’m not talking about a class or formal group, per se, just a friend, a spouse, or a colleague with whom you can meet for regular conversations. Agree to read the same thing and talk about it once a week. The conversation doesn’t need to be sophisticated; it just needs to be genuine and honest. What did you make of the passage? What nuggets did you find? What confused you? What surprised you? What made you push back? This is how the Great Conversation has always worked. While reading in isolation isn’t necessarily unprofitable, solitary brilliance unusual. Learning happens within the friction, inquisitive tensions, and illumination that occurs when two minds meet over a shared text. Finally, be patient with the difficulty. Of course, there will be passages you do not understand. At times, there will be arguments you can’t seem to follow. There will be days when fifteen minutes will go by quickly and others where St. Augustine feels like an hours worth of wrestling. Don’t confuse this with failure. It’s actually a sign that you are reading something worthy of your attention. Texts that offer no resistance offer no transformation. The summer beach novel is light and effortless for a reason. The texts that require effort from you, texts that require you to reach above and beyond your current intellectual capacity, are the texts that give something back that effortless reading never could. In closing consider how this works itself out for just a minute. Fifteen minutes a day is ninety minutes a week. In a year, it is more than seventy-five hours. In seventy-five hours, you can read the Confessions, the Apology, the Abolition of Man, and a dozen other texts that have shaped the Western imagination for centuries. And the great thing is, you’ll not be the same person at the end of that year. You will be wiser, more attentive, better equipped to ask the questions that matter in life, and better equipped to sit with the questions and answers long enough to learn from them. The tradition has been waiting for you for a very long time. It is not going anywhere. Fifteen minutes. One book. you can begin this week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

21 de may de 20269 min

What Happens When Wisdom Is Recovered

Descripción

Comentarios

Empieza 7 días de prueba

Todos los episodios