Welcome to 2025
What's up after a long break
I hope everyone enjoyed restful holidays and a respite from being “overly online” — for those of us who are prone to such things.
I actually think I’m way down on that list, compared to the youngsters. But I acknowledge that I’m more online and more plugged-in than I ever have been in my life.
What’s happening with you? I’m genuinely curious to hear what readers of this meandering and somewhat lapsed newsletter/blog have been up to, what you’re currently reading, what you’re doing, what you’re preoccupied with.
Or, re-stack this post and add a personal note.
On my end, I’ve been traveling and tuned in to a lot of family stuff.
My father-in-law passed away right before Christmas after months of decline and hospice care. For two years now, family members have been anticipating what to do with “the estate,” which includes a bunch of struggling businesses in the Philippines that my father-in-law started in his old age. These include — no less — a small, regional hospital (he was a prominent orthopedic surgeon and inventor) and a resort hotel. It may sound grand to imagine “settling an estate,” but it’s more like a call for his five children to put their independent, late-career lives completely on hold to deal with the fallout. “Hundreds of livelihoods” depend on these businesses, we keep hearing. There’s a ton of responsibility, and the reality on the ground is not pretty.
It all has got me thinking about the nature of business in service to local communities, the nature of investment in general (what the h— is capitalism and business all about, anyway?), and the challenges of leaving — and being left — a Legacy.
Thoughts on Community
Since putting my writing on pause last fall, I’ve been hard at work setting up a community for lifelong learners. For real this time. No more teasers and feints.
I remember way back in the day (early 90’s) when I began homeschooling my children, it was early days for online forums. Trivium-at-home (TAH), an email-based group for about 75 homeschooling moms (and a couple dads) saved me. It was also early days for homeschooling, and even earlier days for anyone attempting to formulate and deliver a classical education to their kids at home. TAH members had a lot to talk about, and to re-invent for their new use case from all the traditions we tapped into for inspiration and guidance.1
I keep hearing today that IRL and local are the way forward for civic cohesion, saving our democracy, and attaining to a new kind of politics that might actually make sense or solve real problems — and I believe that.2 But I also know it’s incredibly difficult to “find your people” solely in local, IRL environs. Being online gives access to people all over the world, and TAH was my online access to a world of classical home educators who had similar visions for raising and teaching their kids and who had educational backgrounds and ambitions similar to my own. How many graduate-degree holding moms of many children left the wider world behind in those days — and a promising career — to focus on teaching their kids and trying to re-invent education itself? TAH was that kind of group. It changed my life.
My mantra, expressed in just about every other post to TAH, was “What is a classical education, anyway?”
Sometimes, you just have to keep asking the question, and posing and pondering all possible answers. By the time I finally wrote college entrance application letters for my kids a decade or so later, I had more or less settled on a three-way definition. Classical education is comprised of: 1) the trivium arts, the language-based three of the classical liberal arts, 2) study of the Great Books, and 3) the “classics” specifically of ancient Greece and Rome, i.e. Greek and Latin languages, history, and literature. My kids received all three components of this educational mix in some degree — and they’ve done well with that foundation.
Their education wasn’t perfect, however. It was overly western civ oriented. After delving deeper into the histories, philosophies, and languages of Asia — and after traveling not only in Asia, but also across Europe and Africa — I’ve come to appreciate the pressing need to 1) adopt better methods than trivium arts; 2) take a wider worldwide perspective on Great Books and classics; and above all 3) update all considerations for the sake of the real world out there, and a completely new era humans are living in.
Hence my current tagline and mission re: the Anthropocene.
Let’s be forward-looking, not backward-looking — but, ideally, without loss. Ancient wisdom traditions, encapsulated in those Great Books and classics — and including religious traditions, including Christianity (Blessed Theophany today, by the way!) — might help in the Anthropocene. I hope so. But empirical evidence seems to indicate they’re culturally much ignored at this point, except by Golden Agers and Benedict Option types, i.e. backward thinkers and escapists. That’s a shame. There needs to be a better critical appreciation of… legacies and traditions.
Anyway…
All that ramble is meant to say how important it was for me at a crucial point in my early adulthood, at a point when I was bearing an awful lot of responsibility for the care of others, to able to join an online community. I needed a place to support my own learning post formal education (which did not set me up to live a good life) and to help be a better TLC — teacher, leader, coach, for my kids and a few significant others.
Over the intervening years, that sense of responsibility has branched out to include other families, adult learners in my parish and at the seminary where I taught, and a wider and growing group of acquaintances online. Don’t we all have ongoing — even expanding — obligations towards our children, towards families in local IRL communities, towards fellow adult learners in our workplaces, parishes, and social milieus, including online?
I want that kind of community back, and so far I haven’t found it — IRL or online — so I’m creating it.3
Coming Up in 2025
For 2025, I’ll be back to writing here, with a slight rebrand. My thought is to get back to more of the original cadence and format of the “Daily Inchoate,” which was how I started substack’ing back in November 2023. I want to write off the cuff and share what I’m learning and thinking about, I’ll also float here first some (maybe crazy) proposals for an Anthropocene focused, lifelong-learner re-think. I’m counting on you, dear readers, to give feedback.
I also want to write fuller, slightly more formal essays. But those will take time and will need a less busy, noisy home than Substack. I have an old Ghost blog that I’ll eventually resurrect for that purpose.
But the community — Sojourners — will be the thing this year. Along with adult focused lifelong learning, reading and writing, it’ll cater to travelers, since travel is one of the absolute best ways to learn beyond the books, beyond the ever-online, beyond one’s own IRL local. Travel gets you to the local of other places in the world, other people, other life ways, other versions of humans living the Anthropocene, for better or worse than what we ourselves are living through here and now, wherever you are personally.4
Sojourners will also cater to TLCs, the teachers, small group leaders, and coaches of the world who are working to bring others along, their own children, their neighbors and friends, their travel buddies, their colleagues, their parishioners and civic organization co-conspirators.
Everybody’s an obligatory learner today, far beyond whatever formal credentials they’ve accumulated or job-career “upskilling” they’ve undertaken.
To be good citizens in a democracy, good members of a culture and society, good neighbors to family, friends and local acquaintances, good inheritors of legacy “estates,” good humans in this Anthropocene, we’ve got to keep on wrestling with the history and geography, philosophy and theology, politics and economics, science and technology, languages and literatures, useful and fine arts — and all the rest of it. It’s a lot. No one can do everything. We should gang together a bit.
Watch for forthcoming on Sojourners’ launch. I’ll be recruiting ten first founding members soon. If you think you need to be one of those ten, or if you’d just like to be sure to be on the list, DM me.
Oh, and subscribe, if you haven’t already.
Happy New Year. Blessed Theophany.
An example was to reinvent writing for K12 classical students, drawing on the classical rhetorical progymnasmata. Yours truly joined up with a couple friends from TAH to launch a curriculum series for this purpose.
The usual citations are to Putnam and de Tocqueville. I’m keeping tabs on Andrew Yang’s Forward Party as well. One of my daughters has similarly been on me personally to be less online and more locally and in-person involved.
There are some fascinating experiments in learning communities, of which I’m aware and even an exploratory member. For example: Ness Labs, Interintellect, Bianca Pereira’s Prolific Researcher community, and so many reading groups focused on particular authors or kinds of books, many hosted here on Substack. Not to mention the whole PKM industry…
I've also been thinking about 2025 and what it's going to bring, and what I'd like to be working towards. Not sure how Substack fits in with that. But this will probably be the year to find out!