00:02:10.380that the building blocks of their world would be saved
00:02:13.080by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal
00:02:16.100that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it.0.75
00:02:18.560By men so strange, they lived in little huts0.98
00:02:21.640on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills
00:02:27.720and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, quote, looking back from the great civilizations of
00:02:33.44012th century France or 17th century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time,
00:02:39.280almost 100 years, Western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael,
00:02:45.580a pinnacle of rock 18 miles from the Irish coast, rising 700 feet out of the sea, end quote.
00:02:52.400So writes Thomas Cahill about the strange moment when Rome fell and Western civilization hung in the balance.
00:02:59.220We may take it for granted today, but our literature, Christian culture, and heroes almost did not make it after the sack of the Great Empire.
00:03:08.660And yet, as Cahill points out, a strange people from Ireland, all too often disdained by their English neighbors and the rest of the world, would save the day for the West.
00:03:18.240As we tell the story of the Irish who saved civilization in this episode of the King's
00:03:23.300Hall podcast, we're reminded that small backwoods communities can play a pivotal role in securing
00:15:37.300and love of wisdom, the acme of ancient civilized discourse would all have gone down the drain of
00:15:43.220history, end quote. Not only were the Romans losing classical antiquity and civilization,
00:15:50.420they were losing confidence. Again, Cahill writes, quote, what is really lost when a civilization
00:15:56.680wearies and grows small is confidence, a confidence built on the order and balance that leisure makes
00:16:02.420possible. As the art historian Kenneth Clark said, civilization requires a modicum of material
00:16:08.540prosperity, enough to provide a little leisure, but far more it requires confidence. Confidence
00:16:15.220in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in
00:16:21.220one's own mental powers. Vigor, energy, vitality, all the great civilizations or civilizing epics
00:16:28.820have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilization consists in
00:16:34.480fine sensibilities and good conversations and all that. That can be among the agreeable results of
00:16:40.340civilization, but they are not what makes a civilization. And a society can have these
00:16:45.800amenities and yet be dead and rigid, end quote. Obviously, we didn't lose all Latin literature.
00:16:52.600It's still here, still inspiring, still epic, still making the biblicists mad. The Aeneid still1.00
00:16:59.940inspires great men. Virgil's brilliant verses still burn on the pages, and his dazzlingly
00:17:06.760intricate Latin is still the pinnacle of classical antiquity. Now, Latin culture wasn't lost. It was
00:17:12.080saved from the fire, but someone had to do the saving. So who saved it? Across the world from
00:17:17.920Rome, there is a tiny island where the people called the Irish dwell. The Irish are part of
00:17:24.020an ethnic group called the Celts. The Celtic ethnicity is not limited to Ireland, the island
00:17:29.940where the Irish live. They first became known to Western civilization in 600 BC when they ventured
00:17:35.940across the River Rhine and into Roman territory. Some of them settled in France and would later
00:17:41.300become the Gauls. Some traveled as far as Turkey and received a letter as the Galatian church from
00:17:47.460Paul the Apostle. Others branched out to the island later known as England and became the Britons.
00:17:53.640In 350 BC, they reached Ireland. At present, Ireland is the only Celtic nation state in the
00:17:59.920whole world. The Irish are the lone survivors of the Celtic heritage. What were they like as a
00:18:05.500culture. Thomas Cahill describes the Irish as an illiterate, aristocratic, semi-nomadic,
00:18:11.860Iron Age warrior culture, its wealth based on animal husbandry and slavery.
00:18:17.300They were a semi-nomadic cattle people, and due to their nature, the Irish changed very little.0.94
00:18:23.360Some cultures usually only undergo change when it's brought by an outside influence
00:18:27.920and can go for long periods of time with little to no cultural oscillation. It seems that for
00:18:33.840centuries, Ireland did just that, remained relatively unchanged. As far as their history
00:18:39.640and literature goes, Irish character is abundantly clear throughout their ancient epics. It is
00:18:45.580especially clear in their epic Tyne Bokulna, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley. Again, Cahill says that
00:18:51.840quote, the first thing that will probably strike any modern reader who opens the Tyne is what a
00:18:57.140rough, strange world this is, both simple and full of barbaric splendor. Here is no deliberation or
00:19:03.560subtlety, no refinement or ambiguity. We know immediately that we are at a far removed from
00:19:09.380Virgil, Cicero, Plato, and the whole literary tradition of the classical world, excepting
00:19:14.740perhaps Homer. The characters of the Tyne do not think profoundly. They do not seem to think at all,
00:19:21.260but they do act. And with a characteristic panache and roundedness that easily convinces us of their
00:19:27.960humanity, end quote. In reading the Tyne, we see the Irish to be confident and frank.
00:19:34.580They were very rough, very human. They were especially open sexually, apparently having no1.00
00:19:40.220qualms about anything in that category. They were unabashed, very fiery, and jovial. Their people
00:19:46.400were lighthearted and free. The slave industry was also a big part of the Irish economy, ironically
00:19:52.360given that last sentence. The Celtic slavery field was incredibly effective, and a huge part0.95
00:19:58.340of their financial prosperity came from it. The Irish were adept at kidnapping or man-stealing,1.00
00:20:04.240which is a horrible sin. Little did they know that their deliverance would come from the same1.00
00:20:09.700place as their condemnation. See, once upon a time, a very long time ago in Roman Britain,
00:20:16.060there was a boy. The boy's name was Patricius or Patrick. Patrick lived with his father,
00:20:22.720Copernius, who was a deacon and local official. Patrick was hardy and well-fed and lived a
00:20:29.000typical comfortable Roman life. But his situation changed rapidly when he was a young man.
00:20:34.920When Patrick was just 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and ripped from his father's home.
00:20:41.500He was transported to Ireland, where he became the slave of a petty king named Miliuk.
00:20:47.860Under Miliuk, Patrick became a shepherd, a lonely and isolated profession.
00:20:53.260There was little human interaction, as Patrick often spent months at a time alone in the rolling hills of Ireland.
00:20:59.660He knew little of the Irish language at first, so any encounters that he did have with strangers while in the wilderness were particularly nerve-wracking and sometimes dangerous.
00:21:10.940During the six lonely years that Patrick spent as a shepherd,
00:21:14.460his only two companions were hunger and nakedness.
00:21:17.860He was exposed to the cold and hunger gnawed in his belly.
00:21:22.760Abandoned by humanity, Patrick turned to the only thing he could,
00:32:36.000During their Renaissance, the Irish also developed scripts that were an incredibly beautiful combination of Latin, Greek, and their own native languages.
00:42:19.520It is just such an interesting story, I think, that you had this people who almost no one, like they're taken for granted.
00:42:28.280Like salvation for Christian West isn't going to come from Ireland.
00:42:31.720And yet that seems to be exactly what happened.0.76
00:42:34.840The way that they're described in the cold open and by Cahill and others, it almost seems like they're kind of a tick on Western civilization.
00:42:42.480Like just they're there and they're in annoyance and really thought, looked down upon.
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00:43:27.860Well, you can even think back to early America. You've seen the pictures of the signs
00:43:32.600where the immigrants would come over. This is actually, I think, the first wave is when my
00:43:36.560family came over. A Scottish Presbyterian minister had come over, but there were signs
00:43:43.260all in New York that said Irish need not apply. Because even in America, they were sort of0.54
00:43:48.060looked down on in this British Protestant project of America. Brian, I'm curious for you,
00:43:54.460is there a piece of this that is inspiring as you think about, again, our cultural moment
00:44:00.920can seem bleak, but something is helpful about reading histories like this and saying, well,
00:44:05.760this is not the first time that Western Civ has been on the ropes. Yeah, no, that is so encouraging
00:44:11.940to see, just legitimately, like what Chesterton said about five times the church has almost
00:44:18.580gone to the dogs, and each time it was the dogs that died, you just see that God does
00:44:24.000like to write this story in history, where he likes to take a small and insignificant
00:44:29.940sort of people or place, or even individual persons like Patrick, a slave boy stolen from
00:44:37.140his homeland and use them in these pivotal moments that you could never in the in the moment predict
00:44:42.700right how they're going to shake out you could never predict that oh that that pastor guy is
00:44:47.060going to be he's going to be pivotal not only in the conversion of the irish people but then the
00:44:52.300subsequent salvation of western civilization by the christianized irish those kinds of stories
00:44:59.080they give you hope um when the times are hard but they also there's such a call to you know like the
00:45:06.440the key theme of the Aeneid, the pietos, where Virgil aims to put in you this devotion to family
00:45:15.220and country in your God, the gods, I mean, in the case of the Aeneid. But this pietos that you would
00:45:22.920care more, not just about the individual hero like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, where you have
00:45:27.980this individualized glory and heroes, but the Aeneid itself gives you this pietos, love for
00:45:34.240your people, love for your country, love for your God, what he could do. And it's your individual
00:45:39.220pursuit of mastery and love and virtue is set in the context of this greater story you're a part
00:45:46.600of. So I think it's so fitting that it would be someone like Patrick who really does end up
00:45:52.900embodying that virtue of Pietas in going back to this people that literally enslaved him to be
00:45:59.660there, humanly speaking, the one who brought salvation to their land, and then they would be
00:46:05.100the ones who save the Aeneid that embodies Pietas in its story, in the Roman ethos. So it's just
00:46:13.100like all of these layers weave together in the story of the Irish and Patrick, and so many of
00:46:18.780them, they call us in a time where there is not love for family and nation and your God in our
00:46:25.280land where there's a dearth of those things. It calls us to embody and aim to imitate a man like
00:46:32.400Patrick and give ourselves to that same sort of devotion in a time when, frankly, how could he
00:46:38.920have expected to succeed? He couldn't. We're in a time where it's like Gimli, small chance of
00:46:46.920success, what certain death, what are we waiting for? It's like, yes, that's where we find ourselves.
00:46:52.460And so you need stories like this, even if you do end up going to your death, even if you do go into obscurity, even if you fail, you need stories like this in your backbone to steal you for doing your duty in a chapter like this in the story God's writing.
00:47:09.960Yeah, I think that's great. One of the other things I find so interesting, Cahill points this out, Dan, but the idea that Christianity transformed Roman culture, but also that Roman culture played a pivotal role in shaping Christianity.
00:47:24.520Even today, we have sort of these, you know, on Twitter disputes or on Acts where people will say, you know, we don't need to read Aristotle or Virgil.
00:47:34.060But I was even thinking back to C.S. Lewis, who said, you know, he listed the great works that influenced him that he would recommend to other people.
00:48:08.260Yeah, one of the ways you could think through this, because obviously there's problems when you read pagan literature.
00:48:15.000You know, there's going to be pitfalls, like Brian said, love of the gods in the Aeneid.
00:48:19.800But the thing is, if you look at the scope of world history, and you're going to emulate just common grace, the wisdom of men, and the greatest civilizations that ever existed, why would you not pick one of the greatest, which is the Roman Empire, and look at what actually made it great?
00:48:38.740Because the thing is, just looking at the world, humanly speaking, with natural law, you have a culture that flourished for, what was it, like 1,480 years?
00:48:48.420I mean, obviously they had problems in my church history class.
00:48:52.640I actually went through a lot of the history of Rome.
00:48:55.480There were obviously problems, but you had this unbelievable jump in human progress in civilization.
00:49:05.560Even some of the things just, again, not looking at natural law and just assuming that part of our image-bearingness of being image-bearers of the Lord God is that part of what he input, instilled, or created in us were certain common grace laws in which the Roman Empire truly embodied.
00:49:28.840Even things like they didn't practice polygamy.
00:49:32.120They were faithful in their marriages.
00:49:35.060I mean, as much as pagans can be amongst other things, but some of the greatest thinkers, philosophers that have ever lived were produced from that culture.
00:49:45.740And so I think it's a great testimony to the early church that they saw the wisdom in the Roman Empire and in the Roman way of thinking and really used that as part of an organizing principle in which to really organize Christianity.
00:50:06.140I don't think it influenced the theology, but it definitely influenced some of the hierarchical practices for good or bad.
00:50:13.920I mean, Roman Catholicism definitely has its pitfalls, but it really helped give it ground in which to grow.
00:50:20.820Yeah, you could see that even with Patrick, where God providentially chose somebody who would be well-suited to minister to the Irish.
00:50:50.780And they also instilled some of the best parts of Roman culture, which was literacy and thought.
00:50:58.220And, you know, I think that's absolutely a vital part, because if you were if you were to say, well, that's, you know, you can't impose your culture on someone else.
00:51:06.820Then would the Irish nation be what it was?
00:51:10.960It wouldn't be because they would just be continuing to war and there would constantly be this friction with peace and war.0.81
00:51:17.540They wouldn't have the foundational ground of thinking and understanding the world that God made if they couldn't read.
00:51:23.980Well, it's interesting too, Brian, because it's sort of an egalitarian way to view cultures.
00:51:28.880Like we might say that all cultures are equal.
00:51:31.420We wouldn't say that, but people say that today.
00:51:33.740And then you look at stuff like this and St. Patrick and, you know, even the people who had been reared in Rome, there's a clear understanding that some cultures, particularly Western Christian culture, is superior to something like tribal pagan Irish culture.
00:51:49.540Well, I think you can look at other cultures that have not been adopted, not adopted superior cultures, and what you get is syncretism.
00:51:59.180So you can see this even in Mexico with Roman Catholicism, and then there's strange supernatural tendencies, or I was in Haiti for a while, and they mix Catholicism with voodoo.
01:04:09.280One of the things, Dan, I want to ask you, though, is as we think about lessons we might
01:04:13.860learn from the Irish, one of the things that sort of inspires me to is saying, well, you know,
01:04:19.420what if God would be pleased to build some of these boroughs and havens of Western civilization
01:04:25.000literature today, somewhere like an Ogden, Utah? And we start to get into, you know, what would it
01:04:30.920take to do that sort of thing? First, though, I just want to ask you, do you see Ogden, you know,
01:04:36.740you guys really were here before I was, starting a school, thinking through liturgy and worship
01:04:42.800and the right worship of a people from the ecclesiastical sphere.
01:04:46.720We're sort of getting into economics, hopefully one day the political as well.
01:04:51.400But do you see Ogden as playing sort of a preservation role in a similar sense to the Irish?
01:04:58.960I would say in a similar sense, but not in the same sense.
01:05:02.060Because one of the issues or one of the benefits of the Irish preservation of culture was in literature, right?
01:05:11.700that's what we just learned it was but and i think that there's a need for that definitely
01:05:16.340especially if maybe we get like a short break with the current political environment but then
01:05:22.380at some point virgil will be erased like that that that will be the goal is to erase a lot of
01:05:28.960the canon of western history we actually saw this few few years ago one of the motivations for
01:05:34.240starting new christian press was actually the preservation of literature but i think the
01:05:39.060greatest benefit and different boroughs will have different skill sets and different emphases and
01:05:45.700different strengths. One of the things that has to be preserved here is actually a boots on the
01:05:52.440ground culture. It's not just literature, but it's actually a historic culture. And I say that
01:06:00.100as meaning like one of the things that people probably know about us is that we've reformed
01:06:07.100quite a lot. We've changed quite a lot from our Calvary Chapel days, from your standard Big Eva
01:06:12.660sort of flavor church to where we are now. And really the trajectory is not forward necessarily,
01:06:18.880it's actually backward. It's back to the old paths, the old ways. Even our emphasis on family
01:06:26.680and sexual piety and on the confession, yeah, patriarchy, things like that, and roles and
01:06:33.120responsibilities and all of that is actually a preservation of culture itself, Western culture
01:06:38.900itself, Christian culture, you know, but in the West. And so I think that's one of the roles that
01:06:44.780all of these boroughs have a responsibility and bearing is that we're actually keeping the old0.93
01:06:51.340ways, like keeping the old paths, but not in a stodgy way to where it ends up being some Anabaptist,
01:06:57.760Amish Mennonite sort of, sort of culture, but it's still an American culture. I'm, I'm an
01:07:03.900American where Utahns, like there's, there's certain emphases in a certain time that we live
01:07:09.420in that are going to naturally be who we are. Like that's, we're going to have the errors of
01:07:14.520our time and we're going to have the strengths of our time and the competencies and the shortcomings
01:07:18.400and all that. But one of the things that we have to place a focus on is not forgetting the old
01:07:23.560ways, not treading, not neglecting the old paths to where they become so grown over with briars
01:07:30.360and brambles that they're forgotten. And a lot of that is just confessionalism, is the teaching
01:07:36.440of our fathers and the honoring of our fathers and not removing or moving the landmarks of our
01:07:41.440fathers. Yeah, I think it's also interesting because when you look at like the monasteries,
01:07:46.280you know, we talked about a lot about the literature, but a lot that they were doing
01:07:50.040too was forming towns where towns didn't exist it was a place for people to gather but the monks
01:07:56.080were also teaching things like farming practices um they're teaching like you know metallurgy and
01:08:01.320and trades so it was also like it goes beyond just you know greco roman literature it's also like
01:08:08.520trade economic and and that's why you get these you know this idea even the west of like churches
01:08:14.380at the center of a town or a city or something like this brian just curious your thoughts on
01:08:18.740on Ogden, some of the stuff that we've done here, did that influence like this sort of ideal,
01:08:24.540did it also influence like why a school? Yeah, absolutely. So, and wow, I have a lot of thoughts.
01:08:32.500Sometimes I have a lot of thoughts, Eric, and they all, they're like yelling. One of, one of the,
01:08:37.560to the resourcement question and then to the, to the school and on the ground culture question,
01:08:41.360I think it's important to find that, that when you said about the work of reform and resourcement
01:08:47.580going back to the older paths. And some of the work that you often end up doing is clearing away
01:08:55.320modern accretions or clearing away or going back on a path and finding that you took a wrong turn.
01:09:04.180And so one of the purposes of preservation of these works and of thought from something like
01:09:11.380even take the 16th century, 17th century work of Protestant theology and things like that,
01:09:17.960and the Protestant theological resourcement movement that we've seen in the last 20 years
01:09:22.540and continues today. One of the things that it does is it challenges your modern suppositions,
01:09:28.020and it will often demonstrate that some part of your thinking and practice is actually fairly
01:09:33.260modern. Sometimes even things that you thought were very old turn out to be actually from the
01:09:38.7801960s or the 1980s or, you know, something like that. And that you actually thought that those
01:09:44.400things were classically reformed ideas. So it's a dangerous work resourcement because it can end up
01:09:50.900turning you back and finding that, wow, we're aliens, like the way we think is alien. This is
01:09:57.840why, not to beat a dead horse, but this is why the post-war consensus conversation can be so
01:10:03.560challenging is because a lot of the time what we find in post-war thinking or in modern thinking
01:10:09.160even if you don't like post-war consensus just stick with me like you call this post-enlightenment
01:10:13.560thinking too and it i think that's true as well but especially in a concentrated way post
01:10:18.000world war ii 1960s onward that kind of thing um you you find that um things that we thought were
01:10:26.440very old or automatically correct ways of thinking are not how our fathers thought at all
01:10:31.680And then when you start going back, you have this dangerous moment where you go, am I going to think and talk and speak like they did or am I not?
01:10:43.220And it doesn't mean that every thought that's older is automatically correct or anything like that or that you can critique and grow.
01:10:51.120And I think the church grows in knowledge and there's a possibility of real progress.
01:10:56.180We're Christians, so we can progress towards an ideal, towards a heavenly ideal, even a
01:11:02.160heavenly ideal that shapes our earthly life.
01:11:04.740And that means we can really critique aspects of former belief, thought, and culture.
01:11:10.200But preserving these things and even seeking to understand them properly and not in a shallow
01:11:16.280way can challenge and help us at the same time.
01:11:19.840Well, and I think if you kind of put what you guys are saying together, like you're challenged by these ideas, but to Dan's point as well, the rubber really hits the road.
01:11:28.940And I think where a lot of the conflict comes is when you start implementing them, right?
01:11:33.500It's one thing to, let's say, talk about head coverings and to realize, wow, this is really like part of the feminist movement that the church has stopped doing this, mail in your head covering.
01:11:41.480but when you actually start living that out in culture and community even if you know like here0.91
01:11:47.540it's not like we're mandating it we allow for the practice but even seeing 20 percent of the people
01:11:52.720the ladies with head coverings on sunday people will automatically walk in and think what kind
01:11:57.060of weird place is this totally and that will create theological controversies and you know
01:12:03.440friction at multiple points i think you could say the same thing honestly about christian nationalism
01:12:08.720nations i grew up reading right-wing political stuff but of the like normie con right like sean
01:12:15.980hannity and stuff like this and so it was kind of the idea that you know religion and the government
01:12:20.720should be separated you should have a secular state and but this was condoned in christian
01:12:25.400circles so then when i'm reading like calvin in the institutes on what a magistrate is for
01:12:30.680you're like uh this is completely alien to everything that i've thought well that's fine
01:12:37.720if you have that as a thought experiment,
01:12:39.280but what happens when you start advocating
01:12:41.820for these policies in the political sphere?
01:12:44.740Dan, you actually run into real issues, don't you?
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01:15:46.900I recently told someone, you know, they were thinking through some huge theological change.
01:15:54.340And I was like, I took longer to go to adopt pedo-baptism than you've been a Christian.
01:16:01.980Something it's like, sometimes that could get lost. I do, I do have a thought about education
01:16:07.240on this front as well, as it relates to our practice and sort of this, like the danger0.89
01:16:11.620of resourcement, the danger of preserving the history of the West and the thought of Christian
01:16:16.960culture and Western culture and things like that. One of them is in the world of education,
01:16:22.780where from the beginning, our school's been somewhat weird in how we've structured it
01:16:26.360in the forms with not just like discrete grades one through 12, but instead having four forms of
01:16:33.520multi-year groups that learn together. And then even as we go, there's a never-ending
01:16:39.380thinking and going back and looking at the past and saying, how did education happen?
01:16:45.220And you find that in the past, in the monastic systems, a good example of this is that learning
01:16:52.400and education was largely a matter of the clergy and the nobility in history, classical education.
01:17:00.700And then what became classical Christian education, the history of that really until the Protestant
01:17:05.100Reformation and onward, and then even into the Protestant Reformation, generally the people who
01:17:10.200were educated were the clergy and the nobility, and they would receive a particular type of
01:17:15.020education in rhetoric. You know, Cahill mentions a grammaticus in that Irish section of grammaticus
01:17:22.180is like a teacher who would teach a student when they were young before they would go to a rhetor
01:17:28.200who would then take them through their later education and become trained in rhetoric and
01:17:32.380classical learning, and then nobility and clergy would have different sorts of inputs
01:17:36.900educationally. And so you look at that, and there's a good element in which Protestantism
01:17:44.660introduced through the priesthood of all believers the idea of universal education, that all men
01:17:48.400should have a certain baseline of education and literacy, and that's a good thing. I agree with
01:17:52.200that. But then what we've done, particularly in the last 110 years or so, from World War I on,
01:18:00.980especially accelerated after the great depression is we've really intensified universal education
01:18:06.360to the point where people are now cutting folks off from this also has to do with the
01:18:11.680industrial revolution cutting people off from family trade and family business putting them
01:18:16.380through this universal ideal of education that takes them at first through about 12 to 14 and
01:18:24.680then it gets older and older then it was 18 with high school and functionally now it's more like
01:18:29.72022 where most people are expected to go get an undergraduate degree in general studies basically
01:18:36.140before they master in something particular and maybe even pursue a doctrinal doctoral degree
01:18:41.580or something like that but when you go back and you start doing this dangerous work of resourcement
01:18:47.740you actually start to realize that uh oops we're not paying attention to the world god made or the
01:18:53.620reason people educated the way they did. Now, there were resource problems. You needed a super
01:18:59.580abundance and cultural in terms of money and food and with leisure time to afford to send all of
01:19:04.800your people for 22 years of education. You have to be exceedingly wealthy. So that wasn't possible
01:19:09.860until some of the extremes of wealth today in the modern West and in America and things like that.
01:19:14.640Especially when the economy went from the home to outside the home.
01:19:19.120But one thing you do start to notice, and we've noticed it, and we talk about it a lot, and we look to the future of our communities.
01:19:28.060We have many young children, hundreds of children under the age of 12 in our community literally gathered on Sunday even if you just reduced it to that.
01:19:35.700We're looking how can we critique our modern ideas of the household of education, of trade, of business, of family, of things like that.
01:19:45.440And one of the elements that you have to go back to and critique, and I think change and become alien to the modern world, is this idea, is to reclaim this idea that there is such thing as an elite class of nobility and clergy that ought to be educated in a certain way, the fullness of a classical education, but that a lot of people don't actually need, nor will they be benefited from spending through age 22 studying these things.
01:20:11.600and instead they need to be given a baseline that priesthood of all believers level of classical
01:20:16.920education in reading and giving them the tools of learning and access to the great works of the west
01:20:22.280and how to think well and read well and write well and speak well those sorts of things um but many
01:20:26.920of them are actually they were god they they were gifted by god to go and be tradesmen or to be
01:20:32.720homemakers or to be entrepreneurs or things like that that won't be super benefited from
01:20:37.520the education of clergy and nobility, all the way through that extreme edge, that right edge,
01:20:42.800that might be 10%, 5%, 3%. And so I give this as an example of a way where we're thinking in
01:20:50.700Ogden of like, how can we really put our money where our mouth is, looking back at these cultures
01:20:56.420that have preserved greatness from the West, but also then to let those riches critique
01:21:04.220our modern presuppositions that are hardwired into us
01:22:01.820and you start going back to the old paths, you know, and the school is really a cultural
01:22:06.960formation, you know, factory, if you will. That's a, that's a word that people in the
01:22:12.620education movement hate, but it's really produces a particular culture. Getting back to the Irish0.99
01:22:18.560though, with the monasteries, being like the center of, of human flourishing and culture and
01:22:24.580towns and cities and everything like that. This has been one thing that I've noticed we've,
01:22:29.060we've been moving more into but it hasn't been as much intentional as a as a consequence organic
01:22:37.280yeah exactly an organic thing and that we've been doing is that um with the monasteries they
01:22:43.680weren't uh in a ecclesiastical uh ecclesiology like they weren't in every single sphere so when
01:22:51.060When the priests are teaching metallurgy, they're not like the foreman over all the metallurgist union or whatever.
01:23:01.320They were instructors in forming a certain class of people and educating them, but they weren't in charge of everything.
01:23:09.720And so what ended up happening, I think, in Ireland was that you had these monasteries that were essentially cultural centers.
01:23:15.980They were cultural centers for which education and economic and political activities all would surround themselves by.
01:23:25.660And that's kind of what's been happening here in Ogden, is that the pastors aren't in charge of every single thing.
01:23:32.060Like you can't do a business unless you have the blessing of the pastors or something like that.
01:23:36.940But naturally, business relationships and connections occur here in the cultural center because you have culturally similar people with similar values, worshiping the same God, you know, and so that naturally happens.
01:23:52.400And same with education and with just all relationships and politics and everything like that is that the borough ends up being the cultural center for an entire people, which is really what happened in Ireland.
01:24:05.780Yeah, and it's also interesting because you have St. Patrick.
01:24:09.020Obviously, the Irish are transformed.0.98
01:24:11.360The next episodes that we'll get into are on Charlemagne.0.87
01:24:14.220And you say, well, what's the connection?
01:24:16.100Well, sometime later, you know, centuries later, you've got Boniface, who will become a missionary back to Europe.
01:24:22.500And they will take everything that they've learned, and they'll go back to Europe, mainland Europe, to, like, re-catechize the continent.
01:24:30.580And one of the people that is most influenced is Charlemagne.
01:24:33.680And it's because of men like Boniface, who's bold and courageous.
01:24:38.840And yes, we know him for chopping down Donner's Oak.
01:24:41.920That's been kind of a well-told story in our circles.
01:24:46.500But the other thing that is often missed is that he spent a great deal of time reforming the clergy.
01:24:53.680So you had gross sexual immorality going on.
01:24:56.780And because of that, infanticide, hiding the sin that these priests had committed.
01:25:01.180So Boniface goes around like purifying the clergy, being courageous, not just attacking the pagan idols, but also addressing the problems within the church.
01:25:11.580And Charlemagne gets wind of this, you know, these stories inspire him.
01:25:16.060And so he says, you know, we want to bring people from Ireland to reeducate our nobility, to train our kings, to be in our courts.
01:25:24.520And again, to Dan's point, they weren't in charge of the kingdom, but they had a vast role.
01:25:30.200And one of the lessons I think that we can take from it is that element of the warrior
01:32:47.740And that creates a certain edge and camaraderie in the church, a unity, a oneness, and a depth, I think, a strength there that is, it's a tested sort of thing.
01:33:03.420Yeah. I also think when you look at the kinds of people that have moved from elsewhere to be a part of the culture here, there's something about it being hard that is good because it requires a certain kind of guy.
01:33:17.740And you've really got to be, you know, there's a level of competence and courage that's required, but it's also attractional.
01:33:24.440Like when you find other competent, courageous people, you say, great, I want to be a part of that.
01:35:22.260a classic custom slip cover that whole, or whatever it's called dust jacket, not slip cover.
01:35:28.080And, um, yeah, man, I'm, I'm really excited to finally hold it. Yes. Here in a couple of days.
01:35:34.120I'm as well. The other thing that I just plugged, well, we've got conference for next year. So be on the lookout for that. We're going to have more promotional material coming out. But if you want to build, I think coming to the conference, connecting with other guys, Dan, one of the big things I think for the conference is actually like the economic and political networking that can be done with other business guys.
01:40:18.280So in this time, when we face what looks like overwhelming odds, what I would ask is that you call back to our ancestors, to our fathers, the great men that have come before us.
01:40:31.320and remember the stories that God loves to tell.
01:40:34.340Because if you were to write the story of St. Patrick yourself
01:40:37.780as a fictional tale, nobody would believe it.