Conversation Starter 21 | Mission and Capstone Themes with Fr. Carr

In this Conversation Starter, Fr. Carr considers the necessary place of Capstone in answering what are ultimately missional questions.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, listener, and welcome back to the Academy Podcast. This is Nathan Carr. You see, there's a way of life. There's a way of thought, a way of moving in the world. A full, unsolicited inheritance. It's knowable. It's fully available. It's extensively eulogized. It's carefully preserved. It's achievable in the spirit. And it is lying deep within the bones of the one Church of Jesus Christ. The cherubim, the seraphim have borne witness to it for a billion years. The glorious company of the apostles gave their lives for this way of life, the goodly fellowship of the prophets as well, the noble army of martyrs. The Holy Church throughout the world has given witness to a way of life because of one vision. And the Academy has attempted to square some of this one fully available inheritance with a certain educational vision. We've chalked the field with phrases like the Academy assists parents in the shaping of students' affections for truth, goodness, and beauty, or in the lives of our graduates, the five imperatives of their capstone. Know thyself. Imagine sympathetically the lives of others. Give your attention to things greater than yourself. Be as free as you can be. Be bound to other people. We could recite further our vision, our portrait of a graduate, the words of our school hymn. But in summary, there's a way of life forged in the love blood of the cross, sealed in resurrection, comforted in Pentecost, which now says that you have all of the time in this world and all of the time in the next world to be the one church of Jesus Christ. So you might as well enjoy it. God only gives good gifts. And among the greatest gifts God has ever given this world is a knowable way of life. Now I'm talking about this educational vision as a way of life on purpose. I mean, what if instead of classroom objectives which are critical, we always lead in this way of life way? It tempts us towards something different in our classrooms to do so. That way, the curriculum that we so virtuously attend to is now in service to something much greater. What if we aimed toward things like this with each of our lessons with students, to heal the imagination, to awaken wonder, to develop attentiveness, to nurture authentic personhood, to know thyself, to imagine sympathetically the lives of others, to give your attention to things greater than yourself, to be as free as you can be, even as you are bound to other people. Today the Academy renounces anything that does not heal the imagination. We renounce anything that does not awaken wonder. We renounce anything that dulls the attention of our students. We renounce the kind of busy work that doesn't stir the affections for truth. We renounce all curricular objectives that do not cultivate a love of the good. We renounce all behavioral manipulation that does not move a student to cherished beauty. We recommit ourselves to teaching parents, students, all of us, ourselves, what all of this must look like for the sake of any of this to be worth our time. We renounce strategies that keep our kids from the natural world any more than we already do. We we renounce patterns in our own lives that do not teach kids the lifeline of prayer as our only hope for reordering our loves and our desires. And we renounce requirements that further indulge them into the harrows of overexposure to screams. And instead, we pledge ourselves afresh to training them in memory, being practiced in virtue, and walking with a baptized imagination.