Please, thank you, after you… Do manners matter? Are they artifice or virtue?
In this rebroadcast from 2019, lower school head Colin Gleason shares how manners can be...
HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive
Welcome to HeightsCast, the podcast of The Heights School. With over 200 episodes, HeightsCast discusses the education of young men fully alive in the liberal arts tradition. The program engages teachers and thought-leaders in the educational/cultural space to support our community of listeners: parents, teachers, and school leaders seeking to educate the young men in their care. Instead of downloads, HeightsCast's most important metric for success is the unknown number of thoughtful discussions it prompts in homes, faculty lunchrooms, and communities around the country and the world. Thank you for listening; thank you for continuing the conversation.
Episodes
December 5, 2025 • 67 mins
"Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 16:25).
This week we're joined by Fr. Carter Griffin, rector of the St. John Paul II Seminary in the Archdiocese of Washington, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of The Heights School, to examine "discernment." It's become a Catholic buzzword, applied (or sometimes, perhaps, misapplied) to a number of life situations. Here, Fr...
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November 20, 2025 • 36 mins
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November 12, 2025 • 58 mins
In our school communities, we talk a great deal about moral and intellectual formation. But physical development, too, has an essential place in the whole-person, long-term vision of what our sons and students can become.
Heights Athletic Director Dan Lively reminds us that the goals of athletic training don't begin and end with high sch...
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November 6, 2025 • 72 mins
One philosopher of our time claims that "today, the experience of beauty is impossible."
Dr. Jason Baxter, director of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College, begs to differ. Dr. Baxter joins us on HeightsCast to unpack his latest book, Why Literature Still Matters, which looks at why such a claim might feel true in our digital age. Then, he talks us through why and how we should reclaim our experiences of beauty ...
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October 30, 2025 • 66 mins
The joy of "being known here" is not just for the students. When a faculty cultivates friendship, it benefits the entire school community.
Tom Cox has been a middle and upper school Latin and Greek teacher at The Heights since 2009. Tom also hosts The Forum Faculty Podcast, now in its second year, which gives a slice of teacher breakroom culture: the kinds of conversations, rapport, and friendship that are born of our shared work a...
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October 23, 2025 • 71 mins
What are parental rights? Are they a legal stance—or a philosophical one?
In today's conversation, Dr. Melissa Moschella of the University of Notre Dame discusses the profound and practical implications of the parent-child relationship. She then explores how those conclusions operate in the American legal tradition, tracing from natural law to John Locke to historic court cases and the public discourse today.
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October 16, 2025 • 31 mins
There should be no contradiction in pursuing hard sciences, humanities, and moral virtue all in one day.
For upper schoolers switching classrooms every hour, or for teachers siloed in a single subject, it can be easy to mistake "education" for a series of distinct academic categories. In this rebroadcast from 2015, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan gives us a better framework. He urges us to look at how our school's different depa...
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October 9, 2025 • 60 mins
"Be perfect" (Matt. 5:48) and "anxious for nothing" (Phil 4:6).
This tall order from the New Testament may put modern parents into a cold sweat. Parental perfectionis...
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October 3, 2025 • 40 mins
The art of mentoring is not just for teachers and coaches, but also parents—who can never really be out of mentoring mode.
In a recent Substack article, Alvaro de Vicente named five pitfalls for our attempts at mentoring young men. This week, he talks us through some of the takeaways, reminding us that mentoring is not a profound lecture but an ongoing conversation, and the goal is not to modify but to form.
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September 25, 2025 • 38 mins
In the broader society, mistrust increasingly defines the parent-teacher relationship. But it doesn't have to be this way.
As a Heights parent and seventh grade core teacher, Kyle Blackmer shares a practical vision for sound parent-teacher relationships. It begins with understanding parents and teachers in their true, cooperative roles for a child's good. And it ends with developing real friendship between parents and teachers as t...
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September 18, 2025 • 55 mins
"One of the best places to cultivate a Catholic worldview in the hearts and minds of young people … is in the backcountry," writes Fr. John Nepil in his recent release, To Heights and unto Depths.
Fr. Nepil, who has led dozens of group treks through the mountains of Colorado and said Mass atop every fourteener in the state, joins us to talk about adventure and a young man's theological education. The backcountry, he says, is rich i...
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September 11, 2025 • 34 mins
How many times a day do I tell my son what to do next?
In this rebroadcast from 2015, our Head of Middle School Andrew Reed offers his ideas on cultivating an environment at home (and in the classroom) where boys can develop their own academic will. This entails not only greater freedom but also—just as necessary—a close and reliable fam...
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September 4, 2025 • 47 mins
To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they've surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled "History of Western Thought." In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch d...
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August 21, 2025 • 67 mins
Properly understood, the imagination is not something you escape to; it's something you draw upon every day to make decisions, understand events, and communicate.
This week on HeightsCast, Dr. Matthew Mehan explores the purposes of the imagination and the habits of wit and wisdom that help us insightfully process our world. We may think ...
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August 7, 2025 • 44 mins
"… the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."
...
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July 24, 2025 • 92 mins
In 2008, Tom Vander Woude died saving the life of his youngest son. But this radical self-gift was really the culmination of a quiet life of daily virtue with a heart of faith.
Chris Vander Woude, the fifth of Tom and Mary Ellen's seven sons, now carries the story of his father's life and death across the country, as well as sharing the ...
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July 10, 2025 • 52 mins
They know we love them; but do our children sense that we like them? And how does that relate to their formation?
In the intense season of togetherness that is summer break, headmaster Alvaro de Vicente recommends four practices to help us live more in the present and enjoy our children—even when the anxieties of life come knocking.
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June 26, 2025 • 63 mins
Months ago, Heights teacher Joe Lanzilotti took up a prodigious project: reviewing the body of popular literature on boys' education.
Partway through his journey, Dr. Lanzilotti catches us up on the diversity of scientific, biological, psychological, and moral perspectives—and how they cohere into a bigger picture of boys and where their developmental needs differ from those of girls. Framing the evidence with papal guidance from t...
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The ever-changing tech landscape and the ever-growing research on interactive screens means that the topic must come up anew year after year. For parents trying to keep pace, Clare Morell has compiled the most up-to-date research into her recent release, The Tech Exit. Armed with the facts and interviews with dozens of Tech Exit families...
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June 5, 2025 • 56 mins
In 1858, six-year-old Edgardo Mortara is forcibly removed from his family's home in accordance with civil and canon law. His Jewish family's legal appeal invokes, to great effect, the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Matthew Tapie and former Heights teacher Dr. Lionel Yaceczko join us this week to pull apart this difficult case with t...
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