Announcement! De-Secularization Course
I need your feedback!
For a long time I’ve gotten requests for discussion questions and exercises related to Journey to Reality, as well as general inquiries for catechetical, Sunday school, and even homeschool material. After talking with a lot of you privately, on substack, over email, and in person, I’ve decided to go forward with the following experiment:
What: a 6-week, asynchronous, online course tentatively titled, “De-Secularization: A Practical Course”.
Purpose: a follow-up to Journey to Reality that goes in depth on how to start shedding our secular habits and start living sacramental, enchanted lives; not just in theory but in actual practice.
Format: The current plan is daily “lessons”: a short video (with an attached transcript?) where I discuss a theme, provide examples, patristic quotes, etc., about a specific practical point in de-secularizing and/or re-enchanting. The video will be followed by an exercise for that day:
A reflection: A short written exercise where you write in response to a question or prompt. These reflections will ask you to dig deep into your secular assumptions, think of examples from your life, or ask you to imagine a scenario—all of which are designed to (a) make you aware of your patterns of thought and (b) to allow you to start rebuilding a sacramental imaginative framework.
A challenge: something for you to do that day, generally having to do with exercising some sort of virtue, abstaining from some particular activity, or doing something you wouldn’t normally do—or whatever is needful for putting the day’s lesson into actual practice. Again, these things can’t just be theoretical, they need to be part of your lived experience in order to be transformative.
Platform: I’m still choosing between different services, but it would be an online course: you’d make an account and sign in, and there’d be different pages with the videos and assignments on them, and you’d progress through the material one day at a time, and you could mark and save your progress, etc.
Pricing: I’m not yet sure where this would fall. I do plan on putting a lot of work into this and delivering something of real value. Something I’d like to offer is a $1 version of the course for a select group of early-access testers in return for feedback.
Priests, catechists, and Sunday School teachers: While I want to offer this course, at minimum, to individuals, I especially want to hear from the priests, catechists, and other church educators as to whether something like this would be valuable for parishes. I’d love to either offer a bulk discount to parishes and/or add additional features directed towards helping the catechist save time and energy and offer quality instruction. That said, nothing in this course would be a supplement for doctrinal eduction, but in my experience, catechism in the modern world requires not merely doctrinal formation but something like a re-building of the moral imagination—and that’s exactly what a short course on de-secularizing would offer.
I Need Your Help!
Please comment on this post and let me know,
If you’d be interested in something like this.
What you’d be looking for in a course like this / what you would find valuable.
What sort of other features or variations you’d be interested in as a priest/catechist/educator. For example, as something more like a devotional, I could see an individual preferring something in a daily format with written reflections, but I could see a group being interested in the same content but with the addition of discussion questions or exercises for a group setting.
And of course, let me know anything else that comes to mind.
I’ve been thinking about this project for a long time, since teaching undergraduate theology at CUA to teaching Church School to teens on the East Coast to being a catechist here in California. It’s a big part of why I wrote Journey to Reality: to help us start reshaping our imaginations. But in order to be transformed we can’t just read, we actually have to change how we think and live.
Do you know anyone who isn’t part of our community here but would be interested? I want to hear from them! Anyone can read and comment on this post, so feel free to share it.
Looking forward to reading your comments! I’m very excited about this project.
Excellent idea. In addition to your material, I've been listening to LOS and WCOG podcasts and reading Fr John Strickland's books (as well as books by Frs ASD and SDY). It's all excellent material, but the "whole point" is not simply more data in my brain. I keep wondering, "Now what?"
One the one hand, it's rather like the Gentiles coming into the Church: Oh, those are demons - not God. Everything must change. But change how?
On the other hand, I fear my own internal tendency to LARP. To make an example of something that came up a few weeks ago: you said an example of secularism is imagining that everything runs on "laws" and sometimes God comes down and does a miracle, but then things go back to "normal" afterwords. Thanks to conversations here it now it makes sense to me that the "Laws of the Universe" pattern is secular. Yet should I counteract that idea (in my own head) by adopting a pre-modern mindset about Angels moving the planets? Should that knowledge change my prayer life?
I don't know how to best ask the questions because I'm still trying to figure out what all this stuff is for.
Cool idea. I’d be part of it. Maybe consider one for kids/teens and one for adults?