This Week's Bookshelf

If by some chance you gave up podcasts for Lent, welcome back to the Anchored audience! We launched the Anchored podcast in 2020, and we’ve been thrilled to conduct interviews with luminaries from all over the country, from particular friends of the CLT and our mission like Joshua Gibbs of The Veritas School and Leslie Moeller of the Society for Classical Learning, to nationally renowned scholars like Dr. Cornel West.

One of our recurring questions for guests on Anchored is what they’d recommend for us to read—personal influences, shapers of their approach to education, what have you. Over the last month and a half, our guests have suggested books like the following:

• The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903), a book which we at CLT have had the pleasure of reading together as a company. Written thirty years after the failure of Reconstruction, this book invites its readers to look unflinchingly at the tangled web of racism in the history and institutions of the United States, and is (among other things) concerned to promote a humanist education rather than a merely utilitarian preparation for the workplace. Recommended by Dr. Angel Adams Parham, CLT’s new head of our Board of Academic Advisors.
• Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper (1952), a Thomist book on the shortcomings of capitalist as well as communistic attitudes to work, exploring how work properly exists for the sake of leisure. Recommended by John Johnson of the Albertus Magnus Institute.
• The Power of Silence by Cardinal Robert Sarah (2017), a book on the importance and fruitfulness of the discipline of silence as an element of prayer, especially in the modern world. Recommended by Dr. Timothy Collins of Walsh University.
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945), a novel about an English painter’s long, complicated relationship with the flawed but deeply Catholic Flyte family, and his own circuitous route towards God. Recommended by Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of The Heights School in Potomac, MD.
• And—an unusual recommendation from an unusual interview—the Mass in B minor of Johann Sebastian Bach (1749), a celebrated example of the heights of baroque music. Recommended by James Kennerley, a composer, conductor, and musician from the United Kingdom, now living and working in Boston, MA.

We also conduct interviews with our own staff. Over these last few weeks, we’ve heard from:

• Kimberly Farley, the long-time leader of our customer service team, who recommends the Gospel of John.
• Taryn Murphy, our Digital Marketing Manager, who recommends Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851).