This morning Mere Orthodoxy published what I think of as the St. Dunstan’s building-philosophy manifesto, coauthored by Thomas and me:
St. Dunstan’s Academy is the only high school in the Commonwealth of Virginia with a commercial building license. So long as that remains the case, the renewal of classical education in America will fall short of its aspirations, the sexual confusion endemic to our age will deepen and intensify, and acedia will remain firmly entrenched as our culture’s besetting sin. More precisely, without a radical transformation of our material and imaginative culture — the underlying conditions that make the notion of an educational institution literally building in its own buildings nearly unthinkable — modern and postmodern disembodiment will continue unabated.
A (melo)dramatic start, we know. The point is not, as we go on to say, that a building license is a solution to the problem of disembodiment — but rather that the way we build (or, as it turns out, do not build) is a symptom of our acedic and decadent society.
More:
If we wish to reverse our long descent into disembodiment, we need to think differently about our relation to material reality, to our neighbors and children, and to our governmental authorities. More to the point, we need to do more than think. To once again embrace the truth of our creaturely embodiment, we need a deeper rebirth of the common arts — the means by which we meet our material needs in the world.
