Address delivered for Upper School Parent Orientation, Spring 2026 

I want to start by telling you that I almost didn't end up here. 

Not here at Saint Constantine specifically, though that's also true. I mean here in education at all. Here in the world of books and ideas and the kind of work we do in this school. Because for most of my childhood and adolescence, I was, by my own honest assessment, dead in the head. 

Growing up homeschooled in a family that loved books meant reading felt tantamount to breathing. We read broadly and wildly and I don’t really remember doing curriculum so much as I remember tearing through stacks of books. So in one way, school was always going to be fine. But I had dyscalculia and math felt difficult and I couldn't make sense of anything that required iterative symbolic thinking. Every math test and homework problem felt like a chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I coasted on whatever general book smarts I had, and I had a genuine, non-ironic plan to go to cosmetology school. I didn’t think about college, it didn’t appeal to me at all. 

The fact that I'm standing here instead, and that I've spent the last decade helping build this school and teaching these texts and believing with my whole self that this work matters, that's a story. And it's a story I want to tell you tonight, because I think it's actually the most honest case I can make for what we're doing here, and why your child being in one of our classrooms this year is a real and important thing. 

 

ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν 

‘My dear Phaedrus, where are you going and 
where have you come from?’ 

 

I come from a family of readers and thinkers. Not academics, exactly. Or, not only academics, but people for whom books and ideas were simply part of how you lived. 

My parents are both voracious readers and life-long learners. Their interests are broad, and they consistently demonstrated a spirit of inquiry and capability that was passed on to my sisters and I.  

My grandmother was a librarian, a missionary who worked with literacy programs in Haiti for much of her life, a carpenter, baker, playwright, storyteller, and a poet who loved Tolkien. She read her bible cover to cover every year, and some of my most treasured possessions are books she read to me as a child. Because for her books and stories were acts of love. She believed that giving someone access to reading was giving them access to a fuller life, and she spent her life giving people that access. 

My uncle Lloyd is an English professor who built his academic career around the Romantic poets and their relationship to beauty, nature, and the sublime. His graduate work was on Owen Barfield, a philosopher and close friend of C.S. Lewis, who wrote about how language and imagination shape the way human beings perceive reality. Lloyd was also, for many years, a personal friend of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. 

Francis Schaeffer was an American theologian and philosopher who, in 1955, opened his home in the Swiss Alps with his wife Edith and called it L'Abri (French for "the shelter"). The idea was simple and radical: they would open their doors to anyone with honest questions. Students, artists, skeptics, seekers, people who were genuinely trying to figure out if Christianity was true, or who had been told that faith and serious intellectual life couldn't coexist and wanted to know if that was actually the case. 

Schaeffer's conviction was that Christianity is true, and because it is true, you can ask it anything. You don't have to protect it from hard questions. You don't have to keep philosophy at arm's length, or pretend that Nietzsche doesn't exist, or avoid the places where faith feels most challenged. If it's true, it can hold. And his motto was simple: honest answers to honest questions. 

L'Abri became a place where a generation of searching young people found that the life of the mind and the life of faith weren't enemies. They were the same life. 

My mother was one of those young people. She lived in L'Abri for a time, and she credits it with her becoming a Christian. She encountered a community where it was safe to ask every question she had, and found that at the end of the questions, there was something true. 

That experience shaped how she raised her children and how she thought about education. She wasn't interested in a faith that kept its head down, or a school that treated hard ideas as threats. She wanted an intellectually grounded Christianity. One that knew it could read broadly, and deeply, and sometimes controversially, because truth doesn't need to be protected from inquiry.  

So when my mother found herself in California in the early 1990s, homeschooling her five kids in a community that would eventually grow to over a hundred families, that conviction was what drove her. She was known (I think lovingly) as the one always pushing everyone toward harder, more rigorous, more genuinely counter-cultural education. She found her way to a young Saint John’s College graduate named Fritz Hinrichs and the Escondido Tutorial Service — one of the earliest and most serious middle and high school Great Books tutorial programs in the country. Mr. Hinrichs was an early adopter of online school, and he was running small Socratic seminars with students all over the U.S.. My mother enrolled my sister and I, and others in our homeschool community soon followed, including the MacDonald family. Ginna MacDonald's daughter Cate and I grew up in the same homeschool community, and Cate would eventually become the founding head of school at Saint Constantine, but that's getting ahead of the story. 

I was terrible at Great Books and even worse at Euclidean Geometry, and after two years of not trying even a little bit my efforts had not improved, so in my 9th grade year, my mother threw up her hands and let me drop out and go back to reading whatever I wanted. My apathy increased, my depression worsened, and my sense that there was no point to any of this began to feel like the truest conclusion I could reach.  

But then… 

“Liberal arts training affects people’s ability to reason, persevere, love, and enjoy. None of these requires specialization or is the purview of only a few. When you study biology in college as a business major, you are not aiming to specialize. You have no idea how the training will assist you in your life. Liberal arts education forms you beyond the parameters of your work.”  

Liberal Learning for All”, The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, Jessica Hooten Wilson 

 

Before I tell you what happened to me, I want to say something about what The Saint Constantine School actually is, because I think it's easy to hear "orthodox classical Christian education" and picture something narrower than what we're actually attempting. 

Our mission statement says we exist to nurture the minds and hearts of students for their own salvation, for the benefit of the world, and to the glory of God. That's a description of a specific conviction about what education is for. 

The conviction is this: a human being is not a brain that needs filling. A human being is a soul with a mind, a body, a will, an imagination, affections, a capacity for wonder and grief and love and beauty — and all of those parts need forming. Education that only addresses the mind, or only addresses the will, or only prepares students for economic participation, has already failed at the fundamental task. It has mistaken the instrument for the person. 

The classical tradition (and when I say classical I mean an educational tradition that runs from ancient Athens through the Church Fathers through the medieval university through every serious school that has tried to take human formation seriously) has always understood this. The seven liberal arts aren’t merely seven school subjects. They are seven ways of encountering reality. 

Grammar and logic and rhetoric are the arts of language, of how we think and speak and persuade. Arithmetic and geometry and music and astronomy are the arts of number and pattern and the deep structure of the created world. Together, they were meant to form a free person. Free to think. Free to know. Free to follow the Lord's calling wherever it led, because they'd been given the tools to go anywhere. 

At Saint Constantine, that's what every subject is trying to do. Mathematics is more than the sum or the parts, it's an encounter with the logical structure of creation, the same structure that convinced so many great scientists that the universe was created by a rational God. Science isn’t wholly lab work and technology, though those things are useful tools. Rather, science is natural philosophy, the serious study of the world God made and sustains. Language study, Arabic, Latin, Greek, are not just grammar drills, they are entry into the roots of Eastern and Western thought and the language of the New Testament and the church Fathers. Art, music, and athletics all aim at a formation of the body and the imagination and the capacity for beauty, which are as much a part of a human soul as the capacity for argument. 

And Great Books class is where we say all of it converges. It's where students encounter the great conversation of human history directly. Not a textbook's summary of what Plato concluded, but Plato himself, lovingly questioning his students and helping them to see truth. 

The method matters as much as the material. We don't lecture at students about the books. We discuss them. And that distinction reflects another deep conviction about how human beings actually come to know things and own them. 

When a teacher tells you what something means, you receive information. You might remember it, you might even believe it, but it remains external to you. Something given rather than something found. When you sit in a circle with other people and a text you've all read, and someone asks a question without an obvious answer, something different is required. You have to reach for what you actually believe and put it into words and offer it to the room. And then someone pushes back, or extends it, or says something that makes you realize your idea was incomplete and you have to think and reach for it again. 

It's hard. Because what we're really asking students to do is learn to identify what is good and true and beautiful in a world where those things are not always obvious, not always agreed upon, and not always comfortable to sit with. That is the work of being formed. Of being made, slowly and with effort, into a person capable of living well and choosing rightly. And that work does not always feel rewarding. The mind is lazy, all of our minds are lazy, and a great text does not flatter that laziness. It resists it. It demands something of you. 

But here is what I also want you to know: we are not without help. We are not without signs and wonders in this work. The texts themselves are help. We have centuries of human beings who looked hard at the same questions your child is going to face and left behind the most honest account they could of what they found. The community is help. The fact that your student is not doing this alone but in a room with people who are wrestling with the same things. And the teachers are help. Not because we have all the answers, but because we have sat with these books long enough to know where the difficulty is, and to believe, from experience, that the effort we’re asking for is worth it. 

Hinrichs wrote that most ideas "are not persuasive to us when we have mastered them, rather they are persuasive when they open us up to a world that we had previously not comprehended." That opening up of the world is what we're working toward. It doesn't always come when you expect it. It often comes after a long stretch of confusion and resistance. But it comes. I know it comes because it came for me, in a classroom not so different from the ones your children are sitting in now. 

That freedom is what we're after here at Saint Constantine. In every classroom. In every subject. The moment when a student realizes they are looking at something real, and that it matters, and that they are going to have to decide what they think about it and let it form their life. 

A student who stands on the precipice of adulthood here at our school is not primarily asked "what do you want to do?" but "what sort of person should you be?" 

That's the question every subject at this school is, in its own way, trying to help your child answer. 

“Please, what task, Sir?” said Jill. 

“The Task for which I called you and him here out of your own world.” 

This puzzled Jill very much. “It’s mistaking me for someone else,” she thought… 

“…could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. Scrubb said we were to call to – to Somebody – it was a name I wouldn’t know – and perhaps the Somebody would let us in. And we did, and then we found the door open.” 

“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion. 

The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis 

 

So. Senior year of high school. My mother, at something of a loss about what to do with me, asked if I wanted to try one more Great Books class, this time with some friends from church, connected to a program at Biola University in Los Angeles. Students who had completed Mr. Hinrichs' program were looking for the next step, and they found that at the Torrey Honors College - a four-year Great Books honors college at Biola University in southern California, founded by a philosopher named John Mark Reynolds. My sister and Cate were at Biola and in Torrey, but I was still vaguely considering perms and highlights as my calling. Torrey eventually created its own high school dual credit program for homeschool students, and one day in August of 2006 that is where I found myself.  

That year I had a teacher named Matthew Lee Anderson — now Dr. Anderson, a philosophy professor at Baylor University, but then a young man who was passionate and demanding and who hated intellectual laziness with something close to a personal offense. He believed, visibly and vocally, that what we did in that room mattered for who we were going to become. That the work of reading and arguing and thinking carefully was connected to our spiritual formation; that you couldn't separate the life of the mind from the life of the soul, and by golly we were going to care about that or we could get out of the room and stop wasting everyone’s time. 

He clocked my coasting strategy immediately and started demanding something I had never really been asked to give: actual effort, in the service of actual thinking, in pursuit of something actually true. 

And then there were the texts. I remember sitting with John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (not an obviously thrilling read, but give it a try sometime!) and feeling, for the first time, genuinely awake. The nature of man. The question of ownership. The foundations of civil society. These were the operating system underneath my actual life. And I could access them. And what I concluded about them would shape who I was and how I lived. My effort was being rewarded with something real, something that meant something.  

That's the thing that happened. And I've been trying to find the right words for it ever since, because it's not easy to describe. It's not "I found education interesting." It's something closer to: I realized that these questions were my questions. That the great conversation going on in these books was a conversation I was already inside of, whether I'd chosen to be or not. And now I had a way to participate in it consciously, with tools, in the company of people who took it seriously.  

I recently interviewed a prospective faculty member who went through our own upper school program. We were talking about the low-grade apathy that's easy to see in students. There is that disconnection between what we're offering and their own sense of why it should matter. And she described a moment in her own Great Books class when she realized that if she came to a conclusion during discussion, she would have to live that way. She had found something true. Not merely interesting, not academically correct, but genuinely, directingly, life-changingly true and she was going to have to do something about it. 

I recognized that immediately. That's it. That's the calling. And it cannot be manufactured or shortcut. It requires real encounter with the real thing. 

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell. 

Alfred Lord Tennyson 

 

There's an instinct, and it comes from a real place of care, to want to protect our children from ideas that might unsettle their faith. To keep the reading list close to home, close to what we already believe is true. I understand that, and even I have felt it as a teacher. The moment when a student encounters something genuinely challenging and you watch them wrestle with it and you think: is this okay? Is this going to be okay? 

I want to make the case that not only is it okay, but it’s also necessary. And that the Church has always known this.  

Saint Basil the Great, one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, whose feast we celebrate in January, wrote an address to young men in the fourth century on exactly this question. Why should Christian students read Homer? Why does Plato matter? Why engage with pagan literature at all? 

His answer was: "We must be conversant with poets, with historians, with orators, indeed with all men who may further our soul's salvation. Just as dyers prepare the cloth before they apply the dye... so indeed must we also, if we would preserve indelible the idea of the true virtue, become first initiated in the pagan lore, then at length give special heed to the sacred and divine teachings, even as we first accustom ourselves to the sun's reflection in the water, and then become able to turn our eyes upon the very sun itself." 

The image is everything. You can't look directly at the sun without preparation. What we are doing in the work of the classroom and discussion and the dialectic is preparing the eyes of the soul for what Scripture and the liturgy will eventually make fully visible. We are training their eyes to look fully upon the son of God by looking carefully for where that glory is reflected.  

And Basil wasn't inventing something new when he wrote this, he was articulating what educated Christians had always practiced. Augustine was a teacher before his conversion and never stopped being one after. Moses, Basil points out, was trained in all the learning of the Egyptians before he led the people of God. The prophet Daniel studied the lore of the Chaldeans in Babylon before taking up the sacred teachings. 

The severing of intellectual formation from spiritual formation isn't the ancient Christian norm. The idea that serious engagement with difficult books and hard questions is somehow a threat to or in competition with faith is a modern anxiety. 

What Schaeffer was making available at L'Abri and what my mother found there, what Mr. Hinrichs was creating in those early days of online school and what Cate found there, and what I was given by Mr. Anderson was a recovery of that older confidence. The confidence that says: we can ask anything. We can read anything. We can engage with the world and not be destroyed by it, because truth holds up. The King's children, as Hinrichs put it, "do not hide in the alleys but walk confidently knowing that the sun that shines belongs to their Father." 

That's the spirit of what we're doing here. A genuine, rigorous, open-handed engagement with the great conversation of human history. Not a narrow curriculum with a list of approved ideas and assessed learning outcomes. We read and seek as Christians who aren't afraid of it, because we trust that at the end of every honest question, there is something true. 

“The liberal arts themselves are not mere skills or techniques to be mastered and passed along to the young adults we happen to teach. Rather, they are a way of life, the crafts or practices by which we live out the freedom that makes us flourish as human beings. This way of life ought to cultivate in us a spirit of liberality and a communal desire to mend a tattered world, to seek justice for our neighbor, and to heal social divisions. In short, the liberal arts must liberate or they are mere semblances of wisdom masquerading as the real thing. And this liberation is most likely to happen in the company of good friends.” 

“Among the Ruins”, The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, David Henreckson 

 

Ideas don't travel through books alone. They travel through people. 

After that senior year class, I ended up needing to take a gap year due to some family circumstances. I asked if I could audit the final year of the high school great books program during that time, and it was there I met a young teacher named Tim Bartel, who is now the Provost of Saint Constantine College. Tim was then exactly what he is now: an unfailingly generous, cheerful, deeply talented poet and teacher who took the texts seriously and took his students (and their own terrible John-Mayer-inspired poetry) seriously in equal measure. He took what had been sparked in me and fanned it until it burned on its own. 

The next year I was at Biola and at Torrey I met John Mark Reynolds, the philosopher who built the program and became my teacher. It was there I met Al Geier and learned to love Plato. It was there I met many of the people who have been and are yet my colleagues —  Jon and Megan Mueller, Shane Martin, Nick and Justine Dalbey, Kris Yee, Matthew Haggerty, and others who would eventually gather around the idea of a faculty of friends that became Saint Constantine. And SUCH others as came alongside us! Especially that wild and wonderful first year crew – Cate and David Gilbert, Michael Antuzzi, Melissa Neacsu, Hope Bartel, Hope Reynolds, Bob Stacey, Candace Stewart, Sarah Fraps, Lydia Martin, Elizabeth Lewis, Lucas Gaddam, Andrew Coleman, Lily Yee. God bless those other adventurers who came to us, who arrived at this school, sometimes years in, sometimes at moments of real difficulty, and gave themselves to the mission anyway. Who learned to teach this way, or brought gifts we didn't have, or simply showed up every day and loved the students in front of them and did the work. The tradition doesn't only travel through the founding generation. It travels through everyone who takes it seriously and carries it forward. 

What we built here is a home for that company of good friends. And what fills me with more hope than I know how to express is what's starting to happen now: our own students are coming back. Young men and women who sat where your children are sitting, who had their own moment of awakening, who found the tradition real, and who are now standing at the front of their own classrooms. The dialectic is passing forward. The line of succession is extending. 

This year looks different from previous years.  

Many of the people who built this school alongside us are moving on to different communities. 

That's a loss. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it isn't. I miss my friends. I miss their wisdom, and their help, and their joy for this work. 

What those people gave us is not gone.  

That's the thing I keep coming back to. The tradition doesn't live in any one person. Not in me, not in Dr. Bartel, not in any single teacher, however gifted or beloved. It lives in the practice. It lives in the texts. It lives in the habits of mind and the quality of attention that a serious education produces over time. It lives in the students who have already passed through this school and carry it with them now. Every person who taught here and taught well left something in this community that doesn't leave with them. 

There's a grief in change. I feel it. And I don't want to rush past it or paper over it with optimism, because that would be dishonest. Grief is appropriate when something real has ended. We are allowed to name it. 

And then we keep going.  

Because the thing that was given to us was never ours to keep. It was always ours to pass on.  

The circle is not broken. 

 

"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to [our children] to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking—the strain would be too great—but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest." 

Charlotte Mason 

 

You have made a real choice. You have chosen to send your child to this school, and to have your family join our community. A real choice, with real weight to it, and I don't take it lightly and I hope you don't either. 

Honestly, it will not always be easy. There will be texts that confuse and frustrate. There will be discussions that feel unresolved. There will be years — possibly this one — where your student is skeptical or resistant, where the work feels like a burden and the payoff is not visible. 

I wasn’t really mentally or spiritually present for most of my education. I dropped out of the Great Books program the first time. I fought with my mom every day about doing homework. I goofed off in class. I could not have cared less about academia or college or the life of my own mind. And then one day something opened, and everything changed. I could not have told you the day before it happened that it was coming. 

Your job isn't to make it easy. Your job is to hold the line. To believe, even when your student is resistant, that the work is worth it. To create a home where books matter and questions are welcome and the life of the mind is treated as connected to the life of faith and both are terribly, terribly important. Because they are. 

David Henreckson, in a book of essays on the value of the Liberal Arts that I hope every person connected with our school reads, asks the questions that I think prop all of this up: "What really matters? What sort of person should I be, in order to do justice to my neighbor? What sorts of love should I cultivate, even when everything seems unstable?" 

Those are the questions your child is going to spend the next several years learning to sit with.  

The tradition is real. The teachers are real. The texts are real. And the work of forming a human soul through honest encounter with what is true and good and beautiful is as old as the relationship between God and Man, and as new as the student who walks into our classroom each fall and picks up a book for the first time and doesn't yet know what's about to happen to them. 

The books are old, but the children are always new. 

That's why I'm here. That's why we built this. And I'm genuinely glad your family is part of it.