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Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln sits down in studio with Ryan Klopak as Arcadia Education searches for the diocese’s next superintendent. A self-described happy pagan who got by on B’s in high school, he found his way into the Catholic Church through a great books program at the University of Kansas, where three professors discussed the Odyssey and Augustine’s Confessions as if their freshmen were equals. Then he speaks directly to whoever becomes the next superintendent.

What’s in This Episode:

• Why a brochure showing a barefoot kid in a Kansas wheat field, looking up at the stars, sold a bored B student on Latin and the great books
• The lecture format that banned note-taking and questions, and why it made 150 freshmen feel part of the conversation
• What Bishop Conley means by the industrial model of education
• Why his friends’ example did more for his conversion than the reading list
• How a principal covering fifth-grade science rediscovered her joy in the classroom through a liberal arts approach

Resources Mentioned:

• Bishop James Conley, The Joy and Wonder of Catholic Education
• Saint Augustine, The Confessions
• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• Classical Learning Test
• Arcadia Education

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction and the Diocese of Lincoln superintendent search
• 05:08: Growing up with baseball and the Beatles
• 13:13: Bored in school and primed for rebellion
• 21:09: Why a rebellious kid chose a great books program
• 30:20: Three professors in conversation, with no notes and no questions
• 37:03: Why the professors despised grades
• 39:54: Two streams of conversion: the books and the friends
• 47:48: Seeing himself in Augustine’s Confessions
• 52:53: Why Catholic, and Father Moriarty’s Catholic bus
• 01:05:45: The joy and wonder of Catholic education in Lincoln

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education.

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

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Joshua Gibbs, director of the Classical Teaching Institute at the Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho, couldn't be paid to read books as a kid—and he started teaching classic literature at 28 with no natural interest in the texts in front of him. Then The Consolation of Philosophy became the first book he ever really understood. Ryan and Alex talk with him about how a storyteller's instincts became a way of teaching, and why your students need a teacher willing to say what he thinks.

What's in This Episode:

• How Joshua's confession as a capable young student—that he lay awake each night planning what to draw once his schoolwork was done—convinced his mother to start looking for something else
• Why The Consolation of Philosophy made philosophy seem doable: its first four books observe how people actually behave instead of laying down abstract rules
• Why a lecture can be a single sentence—and what happens to students whose teachers never say what they think
• Why a high school teacher has to take teenagers seriously and not seriously at the same time
• Why Joshua admits to his students that he's a mediocre Christian, and how that shakes them out of easy Sunday-school answers

Resources Mentioned:

• Arcadia Education
• Classical Learning Test
• The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
• How Much Lecture Is Necessary? by Joshua Gibbs

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 01:32: Department of Defense schools and VHS homeschooling
• 11:43: A good student who wouldn't read
• 17:18: Teaching at 28 and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 28:03: The burlap bag in the woods
• 35:47: Teaching aphorisms through stories
• 50:08: Good lecture versus bad lecture
• 56:32: Stand-up comics and didactic professors
• 01:11:04: Taking teenagers seriously and not seriously
• 01:17:11: Christian schools and the cheap currency of language

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education) and Alex Julian (CLT). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education.

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Send us Fan Mail

Jane Scharl read Crime and Punishment alone at eleven, and what it gave her was not a sense of being special but the opposite: a sense that everything she felt had been felt before, and that she owed it to those people to go find out how they'd handled it. She's now a verse playwright whose Rabelais plays get staged, and she talks here about the classical language she never got to learn, the student she was who could hold every idea and no due date, and why she thinks a base level of unhappiness is normal, but we've stopped tolerating it.

What's in This Episode:

• What happened when a teacher ran a week-long screen fast with his ninth graders, which was not the relief he expected but existential dread, and the eighty percent who said afterward they would not do it again
• Why Jane Scharl does not believe in "normal," and what that does to how you read the student in your class who cannot keep track of a schedule.
• The case that a base level of unhappiness is ordinary and that we have lost our tolerance for it, offered as one explanation for how freely diagnoses get handed out now
• What reading Crime and Punishment alone as a child did to her, which was not a sense of being special but of being precedented and owing something to the people who went first. Worth sitting with if you teach students who think nobody has been where they are
• Why she took a politics, philosophy, and economics degree rather than a writing one, and how wanting to know something before writing about it ended with her staging a verse play a mentor had told her would never be performed

Resources Mentioned:

• J.C. Scharl
• Sonnez Les Matines, a verse play by J.C. Scharl
• The Death of Rabelais, a play by Jane Clark Scharl
• Classical Learning Test
• Arcadia Education

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 02:00: How Ryan already knew Jane, but Jane didn't
• 06:21: Crime and Punishment alone as a child
• 13:27: Why Jane doesn't believe in normal
• 18:07: Xenophon's ten thousand, and what silence does to a person
• 22:27: The Walden challenge, and the dread it turned up
• 27:49: Shaman initiation, and being buried in the cave
• 32:04: The womb you outgrow, and purgatory as grace
• 46:24: Studying philosophy so she would have something to write about
• 58:48: The Rabelais trilogy

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education) and Alex Julian (CLT). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education.

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.