What do our children need most from us in the unsteady years of middle school? First, says Head of Middle School Andy Reed, they need our availability.
But making ourselves fully and ho...
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
March 19, 2026 • 51 mins
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March 12, 2026 • 65 mins
Today, we have an increasing store of research to evaluate the claims of educational tech. Where does it assist or upend our goals as a school? Where does it support or bypass our students' intellectual sovereignty? Can it be used constructively?
This week on HeightsCast, writer and educator Andrew Cantarutti shares with us the research on digital tools, and especially AI, in K-12 education. In passionate detail, he also lays out h...
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March 5, 2026 • 36 mins
Volume, pitch, pace, tone, inflection: the human voice is our primary teaching instrument. The spoken word has not just a logos and an ethos but an embodied and personal quality—which comes with enormous advantages.
This week, twenty-five-year Heights veteran Tom Steenson shares a valuable reflection on the human voice and how we use it in the classroom. He includes many practical examples of how to engage students, express expecta...
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February 26, 2026 • 36 mins
When we join a school community, it should be to join forces with teachers, administrators, and other families in the "conspiracy for the good" of our children. In this multi-engine partnership, how do parents best play their role as the stewards of their child's whole-person formation?
In this rebroadcast from 2022, Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente covers the idea of wise, willing, and informed partnership with your children's school;...
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February 19, 2026 • 67 mins
Does a talented person have a duty to serve others? What do leading citizens really need to live well, freely, impactfully—even greatly? How do we, parents and educators, order the educational goods?
"When I think of Thomas More's life, writings, and example, I think: here are the materials we need to answer those questions."
So says Dr. Stephen Smith, professor at Hillsdale College and co-director for the Center for Thomas More St...
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February 12, 2026 • 41 mins
"Charity and clarity" are the lodestars when teaching middle school boys with various faith backgrounds—and who are developing faith dispositions of their own.
Bill Dardis teaches middle school religion and eighth grade core at The Heights. In his sixteen years of experience, he's navigated many tricky waters with the boys, with the ultimate goal to bring them into a deeper and more engaged relationship with faith.
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February 5, 2026 • 54 mins
The crisis of meaning among young people gets a lot of press; but a quieter crisis of calling afflicts every generation today. Dr. Arthur Brooks says the causes are the same: not knowing what our life is really and ultimately for.
In his talk at The Heights Forum Convivium 2025, Dr. Brooks shares the facts about calling—where neuroscience, psychology, and theology all agree, and how he (finally) found his. He goes on to say that he...
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January 23, 2026 • 54 mins
Kevin Twomey is a husband, father, and a principal consultant at Table Group, founded by Patrick Lencioni, which specializes in helping executive teams build a healthy operational work culture. Lencioni's book, The Three Big Questions, brings that same expertise to bear on the modern frantic family: helping parents find their family identity, create intentional priorities, and live with more order and purpose.
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January 15, 2026 • 45 mins
The first images of a "protector" that flash through our minds might be the warrior, the superhero, the movie star physically holding back evil from invading the world…. Our lower school head, Colin Gleason, casts a different vision: the benevolent king, the merciful brother, the knight at vigil in the sanctuary.
Yes, our role as fathers is to protect—most often through a steady presence that communicates security to our children. ...
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January 8, 2026 • 34 mins
To prepare for Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, the Eddas, and Dante—The Heights begins with Tolkien.
In a talk from 2016, former middle school core teacher and current upper school classics teacher Tom Cox defends the place of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in the epic tradition. He then explains why Middle Earth is so uniquely suited to the middle school, using Samwise the Stouthearted as our guide to the heart of a middle schoo...
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December 18, 2025 • 27 mins
From utero and into infancy, babies recognize their mother as being essentially one with them. So, being placed in their father's arms is in fact their first introduction to the "other," the outside world. The father will continue this crucial role as mediator and representative to the outside world throughout a boy's childhood.
With decades of experience and dozens of personal anecdotes, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan addresse...
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December 11, 2025 • 51 mins
Our mission is to assist parents in the intellectual, moral, physical, and spiritual formation of their sons…
At The Heights, we repeat these words often, including a paraphrase at the beginning of every HeightsCast episode. But what constitutes intellectual formation? What does educating the intellect look like? Co-founder of the Hillbilly Thomists and Rector Magnificus at the Pont...
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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
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...
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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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