On Keeping Yourself Unfit for the Modern World

An Open Letter to My Students, Recently Graduated from College

Some of you have asked me for a list of readings, books that, in the years ahead, as family/vocational and work commitments pile up, will help keep you in the mindset of your liberal arts education at Christendom College.

I am honored that you would make this request of me, and I hope you will find the following suggestions helpful.

However, instead of a simple reading list, I want to offer you some principles of the mindset required to keep yourselves unfit for the modern world you are now entering—in the context of which I will recommend some books (and other things).

But wait a minute. Unfit for the modern world?

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly”

At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe—my first book recommendation—Scott-King, a middle-aged classics master at an English boys prep school, has a conversation with his headmaster about course assignments for the next term:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ anymore. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

The headmaster then endeavors to convince Scott-King to give up teaching classics (“Greats”) and take up, perhaps, history, “preferably economic history.” Scott-King turns him down—as Bertie Wooster would say, “like a bedspread”:

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

The Long-Sighted View

One way of describing the education you have just completed at Christendom College is to describe it as an effort to make you unfit for the modern world.

By “modern world” I mean the world insofar as it is no friend of Christ; the world insofar as it has rejected the notion of any reality that transcends physical nature; the world insofar as it strives to master and control nature via technological prowess; the world insofar as it is devoted to power and prestige and money and sensuality—and consequently, the world as it is filled with anxiety, banality, ugliness, and sin.

It is a short-sighted view of education, and of life, to seek to make a person fit for such a base and ephemeral world.

So, in the spirit of your Christendom education, let us continue to take the long-sighted view. The view that sees both education and the adventure of our lives as grounded in transcendent realities, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, especially as those realities are found most perfectly in God.

An important part of this long-sighted view is to love the world you are not fit for, and to love it passionately. To love it enough to want to evangelize it, so as to “restore all things in Christ.”

To love the world effectively, however, one must cultivate an interior life and a set of habits able to resist the incessant cries of the world to conform to it.

A million things might be said here. But, as I have been your professor of philosophy, I am going to play the part of your professor one last time and suggest three habits of mind to help keep you unfit for the modern world. These are contemplative habits—which of course are not solely intellectual, but which always involve the appropriate disposition of the heart.

Three Contemplative Habits to Cultivate Across Your Entire Life

1. Daily meditative prayer with the Scriptures

2. Reading books that challenge your mind, not forgetting about fiction

3. A mindset of childlike wonder

Contemplative Habit #1

Daily Meditative Prayer with the Scriptures

Rejoice in your divine filiation. In baptism, you became a son or daughter of a loving and merciful Father God who wants, more than anything, to spend eternity with you. To achieve this, you will need to become a saint. Which means living deeply an intimate friendship with Christ. That will take a lot of spiritual growth. And for this growth, you will need a growth mindset—in every area of your life, but especially in your interior life. Whatever talents God has given you, you can develop them. Whatever opportunities he has afforded you, you can grow in them. Nothing is “fixed” absolutely. Don’t allow yourself to think that you “must” be a certain way and that you cannot improve. This is a lie of the evil one.

Go to YouTube and search on “growth mindset” and you can get up to speed in just a few minutes on the distinction between a growth and a fixed mindset. It’s well worth doing.

Which brings me to my first suggestion. Develop a habit of contemplative prayer with the Scriptures (daily, slow, mindful, silent meditative prayer, treasuring the amazing story of our salvation)—as the bedrock of your Plan of Life.

• Perhaps the day’s Gospel in the morning

• and a few minutes with Acts/Epistles or the Old Testament at bedtime, followed by a good Examination of Conscience.

And here are some suggestions for further spiritual reading:

• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (try to find the Ronald Knox translation from Ignatius Press)

• St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

• St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

• Anything by Pope Saint John Paul II. Maybe starting with Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

• Anything by Pope Benedict XVI. In particular his Jesus of Nazareth series; I am also partial to his encyclical Spe Salvi

• The sermons of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman

• Anything by Monsignor Ronald Knox, perhaps beginning with The Mass in Slow Motion. Msgr. Knox also did a translation of the Vulgate. Evelyn Waugh wrote a biography of Knox simply entitled Ronald Knox.

• Dom Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover

• Anything by Father Jacques Philippe, perhaps beginning with Searching For and Maintaining Peace and Interior Freedom

And here are my two favorite podcasts on the spiritual life and Catholic culture:

• Father James Searby, Holiness for the Working Day

• Bishop Robert Barron, Word on Fire Podcast

Contemplative Habit #2

Reading Books That Challenge Your Mind, Not Forgetting Fiction

Do you want to grow in every facet of your being?

Read.

Do you want to excel in everything you do?

Read.

Do you want to be a lifelong learner, growing constantly in wisdom and grace?

Read.

Read every day. All day. As much as you can.

But don’t just read anything. Read books, in every area in which you read, that will challenge you and help you grow. (This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read “lighter” fare. Only that such lighter fare should be used to relax your powers from more strenuous effort.)

Don’t Forget About Fiction

The reading of serious fiction seems to be a dying art. Especially among men. I won’t speculate here on the reasons for this, I will simply say, if you are a man reading this, I exhort you especially to develop or maintain the habit of reading fiction throughout your entire life. How can we imagine what it means to live the good life if we don’t cultivate the imagination? We need stories of all kinds, of course, including from streaming services and films. But fiction, the greatest fiction, gives us storytelling of the highest order, and our lives are diminished if we don’t take advantage of the highest quality storytelling.

Where does one begin to recommend books?

Perhaps it’s best to begin by recommending some of my favorite authors and their books:

• Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, Helena (historical fiction about St. Helena’s hunt for the true Cross), Brideshead Revisited (of course), The Sword of Honor Trilogy. Waugh’s biography of St. Edmund Campion, Edmund Campion, is also a classic. Waugh’s fiction will help you imagine what it means to be unfit for the modern world.

• Jane Austen: read all five of her great novels, over and over again, until the funeral home director says you must close your book. Alasdair MacIntyre has said, Austen gives us the last full imaginative picture of a social world living the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues.

• P.G. Wodehouse. The greatest comic writer the English language has produced. Almost 100 novels and collections of stories. Enjoy them all. A lifetime of laugh-out-loud pleasure awaits you. You’re welcome.

• Fyodor Dostoevsky. You probably read Crime and Punishment in school. Now you’re ready for The Brothers Karamazov. Take a deep breath and plunge in.

• Flannery O’Connor. One of the great Catholic writers of the 20th century. For you writers out there, her collection of essays, Mystery & Manners, is required reading.

• Charles Dickens. Melodramatic, yes. Masterful, yes. Begin again with David Copperfield.

• Anthony Trollope. Victorian-era life among leisured Anglicans. Sound dull? It isn’t. Start with The Warden and then go straight on through The Barchester Chronicles.

• Daniel McInerny, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (It’s my Open Letter. I can do what I want.)

Non-fiction that will help keep you unfit for the modern world:

• Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos. A parody of a self-help book that diagnoses what is wrong with modern pseudo-scientific understanding of reality. Percy was a Catholic novelist and philosopher. His fiction is intriguing, too. Begin with The Moviegoer.

• Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. Essential reading for how to manage life in our technological age.

• Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity. His essays, “The Philosophical Act,” included in the Ignatius Press edition of Leisure; and “Learning How to See Again” in Only the Lover Sings.

• And, if you really want to keep your philosophical chops sharp: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (and everything else he’s written); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity; Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (the Word on Fire Academic edition with Fr. Michael Ward’s commentary).

• Daniel McInerny, The Way of Beauty: A Philosophical Reflection. Coming from Word on Fire Academic in April 2024.

Trying to figure out your professional life?

• Read Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I recommend this book to my kids and to students all the time. Wish I had read it when I was your age.

And I also recommend…

• The Golden Hour Podcast featuring Dr. Kevin Majeres. A Catholic psychologist from Harvard talks about how to work optimally, with a growth mindset.

• Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport. Another great podcast about what it means to live deeply in our technological age.

Contemplative Habit #3

Maintaining A Mindset of Childlike Wonder, Curiosity, Playfulness, & Joy

Our Lord asks us to be like little children. This means maintaining a childlike attitude of trust in our Father God. Trust that he and his creation are good, meaningful, the source of adventure and excitement and joy. The world wants more than anything to take away from you this attitude of childlike trust, and the wonder, curiosity, playfulness, and joy that come along with it. Here are just a few ways of resisting the temptation to stop trusting the Father.

• Return again and again to the works of G.K. Chesterton. There are many collections of his short pieces, pieces that can be read in just a few minutes. He also wrote many books that survey the crisis of the modern world, such as What’s Wrong the World. He also wrote two classics of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, more than any other modern writer, embodies what it means to live childlike wonder, curiosity, playfulness, & joy, especially as grounded in the Faith. Go to Ignatius Press or a good Catholic brick-and-mortar bookstore to find his work. Some of it is free online. He also wrote some great detective fiction in the Father Brown Mysteries.

• On the importance of the mindfulness necessary to open up to wonder, curiosity, playfulness, and joy, see Catholic psychologist Dr. Greg Bottaro’s Catholic Mindfulness. He also has a podcast called Being Human.

• The works of Josef Pieper mentioned above.

• John Cleese’s delightful little book, Creativity (can be read in an hour)

Activities That Help Maintain the Childlike Mindset of Wonder and Curiosity:

• Read aloud with family and friends. Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse are especially good for this. Read aloud to your children, or nieces and nephews, the nonsense verse of Hilaire Belloc.

• Get outside: plant a garden, hike, visit an arboretum, build something with your hands.

• Throw a dinner party. No one throws them anymore, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. When you do, introduce, lightly, during the meal, a little structure. Ask guests for a “party piece”: the recitation of a poem (memorized or not), an excerpt from a favorite novel or work of nonfiction, a “live” movie review, a funny anecdote. Alternatively, introduce a good question and go around the table with the answers, e.g. “What’s the best book/movie you’ve read lately?” “What positive things do you know that are happening in the world right now?” “What’s the most interesting place you have ever visited outside of your hometown?” The point: to generate real conversation at the table.

• Read great poetry. And memorize it! Memorize a few Shakespearean sonnets every year.

• Visit art museums, go to concerts and live theatre.

• Play live music and sing with family and friends

• Exercise + Good Nutrition + Good Sleep (the adage abides: mens sano in corpore sano)

The practice of digital minimalism is a special category of concern for anyone desiring a contemplative life. Learn how to ween yourself away from digital media every moment a hint of boredom sets in.

• Begin by reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism

A Final Word

all three of these contemplative habits assume an atmosphere of interior and exterior silence: a priceless commodity in our noisy, distracted modern world. On this theme, see Cardinal Robert Sarah’s wonderful book, The Power of Silence. Silence is indispensable. From a habit of profound silence, one is disposed to develop habits of attention and contemplation.

You might be wondering: Do I live these suggestions and principles to perfection?

Of course not. I struggle just like you do. But without a clear vision of the ideal, no growth is possible.

Now, as you launch your post-graduate journeys, please know that you remain in my prayers. I constantly pray for all my students, past, present, and future.

And please do keep in touch and let me know how things are going!

Yours in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,

Dr. McInerny