“… 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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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
August 7, 2025 • 44 mins
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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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May 29, 2025 • 48 mins
In a world competing for our attention, our guest this week admits: “It’s probably harder to read novels now than it ever was.” But their value cannot be overstated. The novel’s unique humanity, its careful and open treatment of the human experience, helps us to develop a sympathetic imagination, tuning our hearts and minds in a way that non-fiction argument simply cannot.
Christopher Scalia, author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will ...
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May 22, 2025 • 48 mins
As we conclude the school year, parents are turning their sights to summer and the much-anticipated family vacation. We bear such hope for rest and connection on these trips—but we can too easily end up chasing a bucket-list.
Head of Mentoring Joe Cardenas offers a timely intervention for our vacation planning, reminding us to plan for people before places. Bringing his own family traditions and Crescite Week experiences to the que...
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May 15, 2025 • 35 mins
As more families scrutinize their post-high school options for virtue and value, the field has perhaps never been wider. Choosing a path carefully, with the right balance of priorities, should be the goal for every high school graduate.
Before serving as our headmaster, Mr. Alvaro de Vicente was the Heights college counselor. Over the last few decades, he’s witnessed an exciting shift in the way students and their parents can evalu...
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May 8, 2025 • 50 mins
Human reason: what is it? How does it cooperate with faith and the will? How can we distinguish between authentic reason and its counterfeits—particularly in an age of relativism, pluralism, scientism, and artificial intelligence?
Here to unpack a heavy topic is Fr. Gregory Pine, a Dominican friar, instructor at Dominican House of Studie...
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May 1, 2025 • 43 mins
Prayer is not prescriptive. So how could we hope to teach our children a practice that St. Thérèse called “a surge of the heart”? Lower school head Colin Gleason suggests that it’s about creating opportunities and options, so that our sons can naturally make a life of prayer their own.
In his talk from our Parenting Conference in April, ...
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April 17, 2025 • 38 mins
We often speak of a pedagogical friendship between teacher and student: the earnest desire for the student’s good, the collaborative adventure through difficult material, and the trust built thereby. But we shouldn’t oversimplify this friendship: it’s not merely to be liked by our students.
From rookie teachers to decades-long veterans, ...
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April 10, 2025 • 33 mins
“Offer it up!” Do we receive that invitation with a wince or a nod? Heights Assistant Headmaster Tom Royals invites us to examine our approach to Lent and “offering it up”—with an emphasis on offering. Mr. Royals reflects on the “happy obligation” that is the habit of sacrifice, and he considers the liturgical seasons of Lent, Passiontide, Eastertide, and ordinary time as gifts from the Church.
Chapters...
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April 3, 2025 • 31 mins
As a Valley veteran, Tom Steenson has seen patterns emerge from his two decades of parent-teacher conferences. He invites us to sit down for a not-so-hypothetical conference featuring the recurring advice he offers to the parents of his lower school students. In short, Mr. Steenson hopes to encourage parents in their parental authority and to help them identify (or sometimes even invent) opportunities for growth in their young men.
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March 27, 2025 • 49 mins
“Are you a classical school?” It’s a question many parents and educators will have to answer at some point. St. Martin’s Academy in Fort Scott, Kansas, likes to say they’re not exactly classical—more like medieval.
At St. Martin’s, a boys’ boarding school and working farm for grades 9-12, Adam Taylor and a team of educators seek to nurture authentic masculinity, awaken wonder, and heal the imagination. This week on HeightsCast, Mr....
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March 20, 2025 • 64 mins
Pope St. John Paul II outlined the four pillars of formation for seminarians back in 1992 with his apostolic exhortation Pastores dabo vobis. For years, Fr. Carter Griffin has used this framework to walk with seminarians through a program of human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation at St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington...
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March 13, 2025 • 41 mins
A great learning experience comes at the material using different practices—listening, reading, memorizing, interrogating, doing, speaking, and/or writing about the idea until it crystallizes in the student’s mind. And a great teacher facilitates those practices in his class plan.
For his talk at the 2024 Forum Teaching Conference, upper school teacher Austin Hatch borrowed the “three modes of teaching” proposed by author and educa...
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March 6, 2025 • 37 mins
Mr. Tom Cox’s approach to telling great stories in the classroom starts with a self-limiting 3×5 notecard. The challenge when telling any story from history is that all such stories run together, are infinitely entangled, and lack the defined clarity of exposition, crisis, climax, and denouement. Mr. Cox provides a practical framework an...
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February 27, 2025 • 31 mins
If we’ve decided against smart phones for our kids, can dumb phones come to the rescue? New options for families have hit the tech market, offering few or select features, and giving parents new things to consider when it comes to kids and phones in 2025. Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente offers a framework for thinking about smart phones, du...
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February 20, 2025 • 57 mins
“It is an atmosphere we breathe in, rather than an argument we consider.” Thus wrote T. S. Eliot about the very idea of happiness Americans have adopted for their own. When raising sons in modern America, we should understand what cultural air they—and we—are breathing. Is that “pursuit of happiness” keeping our hearts and minds restless?
In their book, Why We Are Restless, Dr. Benjamin Storey and his wife Dr. Jenna Silber Storey e...
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