Just Three Seats Left in My Christian Humanist Reading Life Course
Plus, some delightful photos and a brief update on the last few days of our Summer European Trip!
In a previous post I mentioned that the Yorkshire Dales were, in a word, magical. In comparison, the Whitby Abbey was mysterious and uncanny. Which makes sense given it was part of the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The town of Whitby itself is a delightful seaside holiday destination.
Upon departing York, we took the train to Oxford where we made our pilgrimage to the Kilns and the Holy Trinity Church (C. S. Lewis’s home and burial site, respectively). Afterwards, Tammy and Grace rested while I spent the rest of the day taking in as much of Oxford as one can in an afternoon. Due to high temperatures and special events taking place, the Bodlien Library was closed, which was unfortunate, but I had a wonderful time on the antiquities and collections floor of Blackwell’s books.
In addition to this brief update, today I’m happy to report there are only three seats left in my Christian Humanist Reading Life course, a 6-Week Live Course for Adults that begins July 7th. Those three seats represent three opportunities for personal transformation.
Several have emailed with questions, which indicates there are still a number of folks interested but still on the fence. I get it. A thinking person wants to be sure he or she is making the right decision when a commitment like this is involved. I think it’s wise to count your armies and building materials before making such a decision. I commend you!
That also means taking the course this July may not be right for you. As a matter of fact, I’ve already counseled one sincere and eager person to NOT take the course, not just yet, anyway. Having already made some priority commitments with their time, it was the right decision for this good soul to postpone their registration.
But it also means the clock is running out if you want in the July cohort. If you’ve given it some thought and you’re ready to climb out of the cave of images into the light of the sun—no matter what the light of truth might reveal—then it’s time to pull the trigger before these last three seats are gone.
This course is a six-week guided recovery of attention, a love of learning, the Great Conversation that has shaped Western civilization, and a way of life capable of sustaining genuine, lifelong intellectual and spiritual formation.
The Course Outline: Six Weeks; Six Sessions
Week 1 — What Is a Human Being For?
Everything begins with anthropology. We recover the doctrine of imago Dei and ask what it demands of how we live, learn, and love.
Week 2 — Live Not by Lies: Truth, Attention, and the Life of the Mind
Before we can think well, we must be capable of sustained attention, and that is precisely what the age of noise has stolen from us.
Week 3 — Ordering the Loves: The Good, the Good Life, and Augustine’s Ordo Amoris
Augustine knew the deepest human problem is not ignorance but disordered desire. The examined life is, at its root, a project of rightly ordered affections.
Week 4 — Words Create Worlds: Language, Beauty, and the Liberating Arts
Words are not neutral instruments. They participate in the logos structure of reality. We recover the classical arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as disciplines of formation, not technique.
Week 5 — Into the Great Conversation: Reading, the Canon, and the Moral Imagination
Through Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, and Dante, we explore what it means to read well and why the moral imagination must be cultivated rather than merely assumed.
Week 6 — A Rule of Life for the Christian Humanist
The course closes with a personal commission. You will leave with a concrete rule of life—rhythms and practices suited to your vocation and season—that make wisdom not an aspiration but a daily reality.
The Details
Six live Tuesday evening sessions beginning July 7th. Ninety minutes each. A small cohort of no more than thirteen students intimate enough for genuine conversation, small enough for every voice to matter. Your enrollment includes a copy of my book Becoming Classically Educated, which serves as the backbone of the course. The investment is $397.
The Door Closes July 1st at Midnight. Three seats remain.
Spending a month touring Europe this summer has taught me a number of valuable lessons. But the thing I have taken away most profoundly is the things most worth having in life no matter where you make your home—things like wisdom, friendship, beauty, a well-ordered life—are not acquired in haste and they can’t be downloaded in an app. These things are cultivated slowly, in community, over time, with the right guides and the right companions.
That is what I am inviting you into. The tradition we will study together is, among other things, a long argument that the unexamined life is not worth living; and the examined life is a real calling for human beings who desire to lively faithfully and fruitfully.
I’d be honored to have you in this next cohort.