Life of the Mind: Brookewood & Avalon Schools

In this episode, Ann, Andrea, and I talk about, first, Leah Libresco Sargeant's The Dignity of Dependence, and then Sue Ellen Browder's Subverted.  Sargeant's book elicited a variety of responses from us, and we admire her approach to healthy relationships and her articulation of what the ideal relationship would look like.  That point, a relational rather than an individual outlook, is the center...

This episode is a recording of a talk Kevin Davern, Headmaster of Avalon School, gave to parents.  The talk, “Cultural Attitudes That Work Against Educating Children:  Help Your Children Do Well in Virtually Any School” identifies eight errors that might befall even thoughtful parents and offers remedies to them.  The main backdrop is St. Josemaria Escriva’s statement about the beauty of the Catho...

David and I talk about The Religion of the Day, the sequel to From Christendom to Apostolic Mission from the University of Mary's Msgr. James Shea and Dr. Jonathan Reyes of the Knights of Columbus and others.  The first book calls for a change of mindset among Catholics, asking us to think of ourselves in an apostolic age--the change is appropriate to the situation and allows us to be more creativ...

Camino visionary Rich McPherson and I talk about his experience of walking the Camino of Maryland the second time.  The first experience of the Camino had to do with the route and with camaraderie among friends, along with prayer, penance, and graces.  The second Camino brings in new people from other places and a whole variety of different experiences.  Rich has made something beautiful, with and...

Rich McPherson joins me to discuss Fr. James Shea's long essay From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age.  The essay asks that we first acknowledge we are no longer living in a culture governed by Christian values and institutions and then that we adopt approaches commensurate with this shift.  The apostolic age brings with it an optimism as Christians find th...

David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, is the author of A Nation at Thought and spoke at the New York Encounter, where he spent his day with Avalon and Brookewood president, Rich McPherson.  Steiner's dark view of the current ed scene is interesting to us, as is his book.  Steiner believes in teaching for content (not skills in isolation, as has...

The podcast is back!  We apologize for the hiatus, technical in origin, and are delighted to have returned, now with this conversation with fellow English teacher Elizabeth Eames.  Together we discuss The Atlantic's article "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books" by Rose Horowitch.  At Brookewood, especially in the upper school English department, we make a point of teaching students to...

In this new episode, I (host Cherie Walsh) talk with Andrea Francois and Fr. José Medina about Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience.  Building from our previous work on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, our conversation begins where Rosen’s book does:  the degree to which our experiences are increasingly mediated by our technological choices and how, as a result, we beco...

I am excited to talk with Andrea Francois and Fr. José Medina about Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation.  Haidt's book was the faculty summer reading at Brookewood, and we like his thesis.  We talk about the phone-free school day in terms of attention, embodiment, reflection, and reasonable physical risk.  For us, going outside in what Haidt calls "Discovery Mode" has been part of the cur...

Andrea Francois and Ann Vitz join me for a discussion of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.  The novel uses its contemporary idiom (and some rough material) to discuss some of the great themes of literature:  art vs. life, mortality, the role of tradition in modern life, and so on.  We read the books behind the book (Keats, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and so on).  Finally, we appreciate the novel's ultimately...

David Booz and Andrea Francois join me to discuss Brief Loves that Live Forever, Andrei Makine's 2013 novel exploring the end of the USSR.  David was keen to talk about Makine, as Erik Varden mentions him in The Shattering of Loneliness, among the non-Christian writers whose works feature a longing for meaning beyond ideology or pleasure.  The novel explores the childhood and later life of its nam...

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 Ma...

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 p...

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 articl...

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 th...

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...

In Episode 16, I'm joined by Andrea Francois and David Booz to discuss the Hungarian Lazlo Foldenyi's collection of essays.  We talk about the title essay, the problems Foldenyi finds with Enlightenment rationalism, and the problem of the cultural erasure of God.  Foldenyi explores his set of issues by/while looking at various answers offered by Romanticism and by Modernism, Surrealism, and so on....

Fellow Upper School English teacher Liz Eames and I discuss the New Yorker article "The End of the English Major."  We explore the phenomenon, its causes, and general trends in our culture, along with shifts in university education, that take people away from serious literary study.  Placing English in the center of one's education allows for increased empathy, safe places to think through and act...

We've noticed a trend away from giving (high school) midyear and final exams--a shift we saw before Covid and see post-Covid--yet we still give exams.  An exam is a good educational tool that helps students synthesize material and it's good college prep as well.  Listen to David Booz, Shannon Garvey, and Liz Eames talk with me about their exam practices and how they contribute to the project of a...

Poet Sally Rosen Kindred (sometime Brookewood guest and judge for the Joseph W. McPherson Poetry Contest) and I talk about poetry in general, poetry memorization, poetry and growing up, and teaching poetry.  Then, Sally reads selections from her award-winning 3rd collection Where the Wolf, from Diode Editions.  I am sorry that my audio is a little weird on this one;  I think this is one of the bes...

Avalon head Kevin Davern and Brookewood teacher (and longtime Avalon-Brookewood teacher/administrator and parent) John Acevedo join me to talk about chivalry in the 21st century.  I sound like some anthropological NPR reporter for a while, but then Kevin, John, and I talk about John Eldredge's book Wild at Heart, which takes an evangelical approach to discuss the roles of adventure, quest, and res...

In our first live podcast, Glencora Pipkin and the Brookewood faculty (feat. Judy Kearns, Barbara Gagliotti, and David Booz) discuss Jessica Hooten Wilson's The Scandal of Holiness.  We explore UD connections and then talk about JHW's technique of reading literature the way we read an icon, as a kind of window to a way of seeing the world, with special attention to how literature can help us know...

Andrea and I discuss Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a novel I have loved since it came out and which Andrea encountered through a book club.  This is not a book appropriate to be taught at Brookewood, but one for adults interested in family and friendship, in the consequences of actions.  The novel stands out for its memorable characters, its relationship to Dostoyevsky and to Greek tragedy, an...

David Booz and I talk (in his somewhat echo-y dining room) about Henry T. Edmondson III's 2006 book John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, a critique of Dewey that has become more relevant now as mainstream education has become increasingly devoted to social reform.  David and I talk about human nature, the goals of education, the role of teaching methods, and the importance of traditio...