“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 in lessons of creation, dependence, suffering, and beauty—restoring our sense of being created and loved by a self-giving God.

5:18 What draws us to the mountains

9:04 “Nature” vs. “creation”

13:16 Fatherhood

16:00 Dependence

20:44 Cultivating a worldview

25:54 Guiding the conversation (or not)

28:13 Redemptive suffering

31:23 Starting with beauty

38:59 Physical vs. metaphysical limits

46:46 Men doing hard things together

48:29 The backstory of the book

50:39 A habit of reading

To Heights and unto Depths by Fr. John Nepil

Rethinking Mary in the New Testament by Edward “Ted” Sri

Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief by Joseph Ratzinger

Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Why We Go: Seven Benefits of the Backcountry by Elias Naegele

The Way of Encounter by Joe Breslin

Why We Need Exposure to Nature by Eric Heil

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

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 family bond. Mr. Reed explains how this counterintuitive pair works together to teach a boy to choose the good for himself.

6:32 The will: a marker for success

9:02 Overmanaging: telling them what to do

10:54 Boys grow from experience and challenge

12:33 The indifferent boy

14:43 Prompt the will with a question

17:31 Create an environment of freedom

20:16 But keep a close family bond

22:33 Manage the influences

24:21 A parenting examination of conscience

27:10 Patience and optimism

29:00 The will, freedom, and good academic habits

Developing Academic Habits: A Guide for Parents by Andrew Reed

The Key to Success? Grit, a TED Talk by Angela Lee Duckworth, May 2013 (transcript here)

Academic Habits and a Student’s Developing Will by Andrew Reed

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

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 discuss the course and its guide-text: Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022).

HOWT covers essential texts from Plato’s Republic to Pope Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address.”. Its goal is not only to prepare students for college work but to prepare them to meaningfully engage with the culture they will inherit, understanding its origins and its underlying assumptions.

00:02:31 History of Western Thought course
00:08:10 The “HOWT” syllabus
00:11:31 Strange New World, a primary source guide
00:14:13 Teens and the intellectual tradition
00:16:39 Seeing ideologies in motion
00:18:48 Pairing philosophical threads
00:27:26 Understanding our cultural moment
00:29:25 Pushing back on ‘authenticity’
00:33:31 How students respond to the course
00:35:09 Thinking about friendship
00:41:04 Big ideas in a short class
00:44:32 Reading Trueman alongside your son

Strange New World by Carl Trueman

“Canada Is Killing Itself” by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic, September 2025

Texts from the HOWT course:

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman

Republic by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

De Officiis by Cicero

Moralia, vol. 1, featuring “How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend” by Plutarch

Confessions by Augustine

Summa theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas

Utopia by Thomas More

Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI

American Restlessness featuring Dr. Benjamin Storey

A Study for All Seasons: On the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko

Is The Heights a Classical School? by Michael Moynihan

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)