SPEAKER_02 0:00

From the McGrath Institute for Church Life and OSV Podcasts, this is Church Life Today. I'm Leonard DiLorenzo. Somewhere along the way, we started training young people to be merely operators. We teach them to manage the machine, to run the system, to handle the tool that does the real work. And we measure their learning by how well they can retrieve what they need at the moment they need it. It's an efficient arrangement, but it's also a strange one because the things we most admire in a person, the capacity to think clearly when the air turns thick, to imagine, to judge well, to hold fast to what is true when someone is bending the meaning of words, none of these can be outsourced. They have to be formed. That is an older word for what school was once for. Formation. Not just the acquisition of data, but the slow shaping of a soul, its memory, its loves, its capacity to perceive what is real. And there may be no better guide to recovering that vision than C.S. Lewis, who hid an entire philosophy of education inside stories that we hand to children who knew that the adventure itself is the formative thing. My guest today is Shannon Valenzuela, a writer, director, and producer working in the same imaginative tradition as Lewis. She is an affiliate assistant professor of humanities at the University of Dallas, and this past year, she served as a fellow of our Inklings Project. The McGrath Institute's fellowship that gathers educators from around the globe to read deeply in the company of Lewis and Tolkien and the great sources behind them. We talk about what the Chronicles of Narnia teach us about forming the whole person, about memory and mastery, and Aslan as the model teacher, and about where the Inklings Project is headed next, including a new fellowship opening to middle school and high school educators. Shannon, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to be here.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

So, Shannon, you have just completed teaching a five-day professional development intensive course that you've taught a number of times before on Narnia and the education of the soul. So I'd love to begin by asking you to share with us what you have found that we learn about education as human formation from reading and studying the Chronicles of Narnia.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Yeah, it's such a great question. And it's truly been such a delightful thing to discover this particular angle in the stories themselves. We can think about the more explicit moments in the Chronicles of Narnia where Lewis draws attention to the schooling experiences that the various children have received. But there is a sense threaded throughout the Chronicles from the magician's nephew all the way through the last battle that there is something really important about formation and what we do, right? How do we face the obstacles or the challenges, uh, the temptations that arise? Um, how does that happen as a result of, you know, through that formation that we that we've received? So, you know, Diggory gets chided by his uncle Andrew for possessing a certain insistence that one ought to keep one's promises. And he says, of course you would think that, right? It's just how you've been trained, right? And those rules are very nice for like women and servants and little boys, but people like me who are sages are accepted from such rules and kind of boundaries around human behavior. And we just see those kinds of moments throughout. We have a moment where um Edmund in the Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, uh Susan and Lucy observe that he is, he's finally coming around. Like he also had been having apparently a terrible time in school. And it's just a brief, it's like a one-line, one-sentence mention towards the end of the Line The Witch in the Wardrobe. But we get some sense at the beginning as well that he likes to pick on people who are smaller than he is, right? So we we sort of get this sense that all of these children who are coming into Narnia, in a sense, are coming in with a certain level of formation. And the adventure itself is meant to be a kind of formative journey and transformative journey. And that's, I think, the real gift of this, because it's it's stepping outside of maybe that that frame of a standard educational model and showing that that adventure is formative and is meant to show us where we need to grow, right? And uh to help us build on the good things that maybe are already part of us or at work within us, um, but that just need and need a little teasing out, perhaps, and a little bit of encouragement.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Yeah, indeed. I think we're my wife and I are constantly trying to maybe present or represent to especially our middle school boys who are not totally loving math and Latin, that this is a formative journey, right? There's an adventure here.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Yeah. But to think about what Lewis does uh in the Chronicles, um, it seems to matter very much the kind of habits that you developed and that have been formed into you, the sort of dispositions you have. But I wonder, Shannon, is there are there any ways in which he also presents to us or gives us means to think about what we learn to think about, like what we actually study, what we give our minds to and our attention, and how we learn to think.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, I think that again, kind of going to um some of the later of the later books in particular, I think of uh The Silver Chair and The Last Battle in particular, it along the lines of this question, yeah. How to think. Um Aslan at the beginning of The Silver Chair is very clear with Jill that the air in Narnia has become very thick and it's difficult to think, and it's difficult to think clearly and to follow things clearly. Like he is telling her clearly, you need to follow these signs, right? But he also tells her very clearly that it's not going to look like what she expects, and that there is a gift of memory and habit that is meant to help her think and perceive things clearly when things are muddy, right? When the air is thick and it's not clear what you're supposed to do. And this, of course, culminates in the conflict with the Witch of Underland, who is a specialist in twisting language and meaning, right? She tries to basically make them think that there is nothing that exists other than the realm in which they currently find themselves, right? In this cave. And, you know, you can't say there is a sun because the only thing you can say is it's like the lamp that's right here in front of us. It's like there's no reality beyond what you can immediately see. And the challenge there is how do you, how do you, can you, I suppose Louis asking us, can you think your way or argue your way out of something like that? And how do you perceive clearly what is right to be done? And the only way, uh, not to spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it or hasn't read it in a long time, but the only way they get out of that is with very definite sort of physical action and a very clear and firm holding to what you do know to be true in your heart. You know, Puddle Glum saying, effectively, I'm gonna live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn't any Narnia, right? There's like there's a very sort of clear perception in the heart of what is true, no matter what kind of language is being twisted around them and kind of trying to obfuscate what they know to be true, right? Um, so I think that's that's a beautiful example of Lewis giving us a picture of what does it mean to think clearly or what does it mean to know how to form yourself? And it has to do with memory and it has to do with with this sort of formation of of the heart. You know, he would talk about like just sentiment, um, to love the things that are meant to be loved and to hold on to those things regardless of what might be going on around you, right? To hold to Aslan, no matter what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

It's really interesting to think about the place and the prominence of memory in this presentation of education, which is not an outright treatise on education that he's writing in these uh in these tales, which he has done elsewhere, of course. But especially, I suppose, from our present situation. And if we start talking about the immediate situations that we find ourselves in in a digitized culture and the rise of artificial intelligence, we'll immediately date ourselves and within six weeks, you know, there will be something that we haven't accounted for. But nevertheless, it seems that one of the things that's been offloaded from all of us and the sort of promise for especially young people is to take away the burden of memory. Something else will remember for you, uh, or you always have access to that uh through which you can find what you're looking for immediately. And so we could, I suppose, like for children, but for any of us, we could think about our minds as a container in which we could hold things, and we no longer have to hold things there because it's held somewhere else. It's been outsourced. But it seems to me as you're talking about it, um, especially from the example of the silver chair, it does matter that Jill knows certain things, but it also matters that she's the one who is able to hold them, who's able to exercise memory, that she doesn't have to constantly refer to something else because the air's thick, you know, the signs are are um are obscured. And so I wonder, I don't know, if we could think about that together a little bit, the development of these core human faculties and maybe starting with the faculty of memory. Have you seen, you know, especially in your work with educators, um, the challenge of, I suppose, centering the task of education on the development of these faculties and not simply the acquisition of data, the acquisition of certain discrete pieces of knowledge?

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah, this is such a rich question. I love this. Um I did a lot of work, my doctoral work uh was on medieval memory technologies primarily. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about memory. And of course, Lewis, as a as a medievalist himself, was no stranger to this idea that the storehouse of your memory is where invention takes place. If you don't have things to think with, you can't think, right? And I think this is the great danger when we, as you said, our our skills now, rather than knowing how to retain information is how to search for information. That is a completely different thing. And it means that we don't have that sort of facility to be able to create, to imagine, to invent, you know, that those kinds of skills are dependent on a storehouse of memory. And we we see this in the in the chronicles too. I mean, the the number of times they hold on to stories, right? The stories of what has come before, that sort of retention almost of like Narnian salvation history, we might think of, um, as a as a means of guiding present decisions, right? There is a kind of collective or communal memory around those things that that makes possible holding to the right and steering things correctly as challenges arise. Um, but certainly in my own work with educators, I think we have a similar problem with memory as we have with with other things, which is what's the end, right? What is what is the end for which we're we're asking students to memorize things if they just sense that the reason you're being asked to retain this set of facts is so that you can regurgitate them on a test. That's not really the end in mind, right? Going back to our point about this is this is somehow connected to human formation and human flourishing. Memory, storing these things in memory is so that you can access them later, so that you can recombine them with other things that you also know. So, however many poems I've memorized, you know, I can I can pull those up on recall if I've memorized other things. It's so that I can have that at my fingertips. I can read more deeply, I can engage more deeply, I can invent, you know, more with more facility. Um and so I do think that that's a challenge. And I think it's hard work because we we we don't really train this faculty as they used to. You know, we can think about the memory palaces and the sort of elaborate kinds of architectures that allowed them to essentially have a Wikipedia kind of database, you know, in a sense, right? Where you could just pull and and recall things that were connected uh to one another. Um we don't we don't train that faculty in the same way anymore. Um and so it it does, it presents a real challenge, I think. Um helping students to understand what memory is actually for. It's deeply connected to prudence. Um you cannot make good decisions for your future if you have no memory of your past and things like that. So it's it's it's a deeper problem, right, than just how do we get kids to remember this stuff for a test. Um and I think that that's that's sort of the gift here, right? Is getting to see the fact that um this training in memory or this this habit of bringing things in, even and maybe especially in an age as we're in today, becomes really, really critical for this sort of formative aspect of the human person.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

That point you brought up that just to remind us about in Narnia, how important the previous stories are for the children within, within the narrative, right? To to have this treasury from which they draw. And this is sort of like that at certain times, right? Like they're interpreting their present situation in light of previous situation and even to locate themselves at times, like when they arrive, what is this? Uh Prince Caspian, when they arrive on the island and they know not where they are because it's it's so much time has elapsed, um, they're able to begin to recognize and make sense of their narrative because they recognize certain things that they've given their attention to in the past. This makes me think uh almost immediately of the way in which the psalms, for example, uh operate. And in fact, the way in which one who praised the psalm is asked to think and remember in order to be able to speak from this particular place for this particular need to seek after God's aid or God's help from here. It depends very much on having a developed biblical memory, very cognizant of not just uh reading a script, but actually your own imagination being enlivened by the history of God's dealings with his people, in fact, with me. Um and so I I just as you're talking about this, and I'm I'm thinking about that connection, I'm thinking about the aim of education that you talked about. And I wonder, I'm just kind of thinking in real time here, which is a dangerous thing, but if so much of our education now is sort of marked with the temptation to educate operators, like we're asking or we're we're leading young people to be operators of mechanisms that can do certain things. And I wonder what the return to a more classical education leads a young person to become. It's not an operator, it's something else. What do you think? I don't I don't know if there's something that would come to mind, or how do you what do you think about this?

SPEAKER_00 17:10

No, I think you're exactly right. And I think it's it's it is a stark difference, right? Um, as as we were just talking about being trained in a certain set of skills to manage something else that's doing a lot of the work for you. You're a manager, you're an operator. And almost the the word that comes immediately to mind to kind of contrast with that is the word master or steward, perhaps is even a better word than that. Master, I think of mastery in the the kind of you know, way that uh someone who has deep experience of something and has mastery of it, um, knows it inside and out, knows it deeply, deeply well.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

They have apprenti, they have apprenticed and then they become master. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Yes, yes, exactly. Like you, you know the work, you you deeply understand the work. You know, think of it like a master craftsman, for example. Yeah. Um, and a steward is one who understands these are the resources I have at my disposal. This is how I am meant to govern these things well. And we see so much, again, returning to Lewis, right, in the in the chronicles about kingship and stewardship and how good rulership is meant to operate. What does it look like to be a good king or good queen? Um, and that's not just for those who are named royalty, but also for those who are given stewardship over things, right? Um and I think that the that that kind of stewardship or mastery is where classical education would tend to take us, right? Because you are training, you are training the whole person and you are not training them in a set of discrete skills, as you said, that could be obsolete five minutes from now, right? Um, but you are training the human person how to learn, how to adapt, how to flourish, um, how to think, how to imagine um all of those things that um that that kind of give us that ability to adapt in real time, I suppose, as circumstances are are changing, um, to make good decisions rather than terrible ones, hopefully. Um so, you know, that's that's kind of what I I just as we kind of talk about this, that's that's sort of where my mind goes, right? That that's kind of the difference that we're starting to chart out. Um and and in a world that's changing as rapidly as it is, it's it's almost ironic to say that the solution to that is to slow down. But I think that that is in some ways the solution, right? Is to like return to some groundedness or some kind of uh a mode of formation that is focused on the human person rather than on the world, right? We're we're focused on formation of the person not managing, you know, systems that are outside of our control.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

Yeah, yeah. It's such a great point you bring up about the irony. And the other irony, or another irony, I suppose, is that ironically, those are also the very uh skills and attitudes and abilities that are going to be even more prized on the job market if you don't actually train directly for the job market. You know, like you have to break from that just to create operators or managers of certain technologies and devices uh in order to allow for the development, the apprenticeship of real knowledge and wisdom and the ability to make distinctions and judgments and uh and all of those things. And those, ironically, are the things that are most likely going to be more valuable on the market anyway.

unknown 20:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

So I'd love to ask you, Shannon. We've uh you've just concluded uh a year as a fellow in our Inklings project where you took uh some of what you're you've been doing in this one-week intensive or sometimes uh even a protracted version of that uh that course, and you've built it out even more fully. Like if that were a one credit, you built it out into a three credit, and this was really the basis of your fellowship, one of the 12 fellows in our third cohort of the Inklings Project from all over the globe, in fact, who were all doing interesting things in teaching and outreach. Can you tell us a little bit about how you developed uh and went a little bit deeper into this exploration of Lewis's fiction and his approach to education, especially working with, as I understand it, mostly professional educators who are who are seeking additional uh education themselves.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, no, this is it was a really fun, really fun project to get to take that course and expand it out to include not just the ransom trilogy, so Lewis's space trilogy, which we also read. Um, what We also read a number of Lewis's nonfiction articles, including The Abolition of Man and a number of his other works. But we also did some foundation work. Because Lewis is such a rich and deep thinker. We took about the first five weeks of the semester to read some of the things that Lewis probably knew and was thinking about and referencing in the work and gave us some kind of common language, I suppose, to kind of approach the fiction from that perspective. So we read everything from excerpts from The Republic, Aristotle's Ethics on Friendship. We read passages from scripture to talk about, like, for example, especially the Genesis story, which features not only in The Magician's Nephew, but also, of course, in Paralandra and, you know, other things. We explored some of the modern thinkers, like we read some of Nietzsche on the power of the will and you know, this sort of this idea of uh, again, kind of like where are the boundaries and who gets to step across the boundaries and things like that. So we I tried to give them a um, we also did some cosmology, medieval cosmology and this discarded image and things like that, just because the the way that you operate in a cosmological model is so key, uh, both to Narnia and also, of course, to um the ransom trilogy. So it was really fun. We got to spend a little bit of time reading around, you know, the foundational texts. And then we went, uh, we did Narnia first, even though ransom technically is in the uh sort of timeline of Lewis's life, ransom comes first before Narnia. But Narnia has a little bit of an easier entry point. Uh so we went to the to the chronicles first and then we concluded with with the ransom trilogy. And it was truly, truly an extraordinary experience to kind of have that common language going through and have students be able to reach back and say, ah, I see this question around friendship that we've been talking about from Aristotle and from you know from Plato and these questions around what is education and the cave imagery, for example, from the Republic and feeling those and hearing those resonances, um I think really deeply impacted their their reading uh and their appreciation for the depth of what Lewis is doing, even in the children's books. And that's that's the thing that amazes me every time I teach this. Um has amazed also the students, the teachers, right, who come through these courses is these are, yes, they are written as children's stories and you can teach them the fourth graders, but when you come back to them as an adult in a master's program, there is plenty to talk about, you know, from an adult perspective, it speaks to you differently. And and I think that's just one of the gifts um of Lewis's work is that ability to speak no matter where you are, kind of in your life.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Um well, I can testify to that. Like the first time I read The Chronicles of Narnia, it was actually for a chorus in a master's uh program. So uh I read it as a young adult, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:05

So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:07

So in addition to, I imagine the students' growing appreciation, maybe even awe, at the richness of Lewis's thought and how much is actually going on in things that seem perhaps at first pass rather simple or or utterly accessible, which is part of his genius, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Do you have have you seen ways in which the students themselves are also um coming to a different understanding of their own um craft as teachers, their own task as educators? What have you seen?

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Yes, and I yeah, and I I think we we talk about this occasionally of Aslan, in a sense, as the model teacher. Um he's so beautifully, and I always tell them if you have to have a constructive conversation with a student about something that they have done wrong, go and look at all of the conversations that Aslan has with the children who make mistakes, all of them, right? Make mistakes and they all, in a sense, have to have some sort of a rehabilitating conversation or restorative conversation with Aslan at various stages. And those conversations, those encounters are so beautiful and they are so individualized that I think they really start to appreciate that that relationship aspect of the work of teaching, that that sort of moment where you see the person in front of you, you truly see the child in front of you for who they are. And you're working on that, right? That's that's a that's a tough thing to do. And and our teachers are, you know, they often have many children in class. It's a lot, and they have to, you know, also they're trying to manage curriculum. But it's it's it's almost like if you can take those moments that you have an opportunity and and even make those just a little bit more um have that relationship even more sort of present and intentional. Um it just it it pays out so many dividends in the long run. Um, and I think that that's one of the things that um they truly start to kind of put those pieces together. Uh in my experience, you know, really thinking about, oh, I see that, right? I see how, I see how Aslan is speaking to these children. I could see how beautifully that would work. I mean, not just as a teacher, right? But maybe as a parent also, you know, you can take that example. Um, so yeah, that's that's a big one, I think, is that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Well, you've also been helping us in the last uh couple of months to think about how to kind of extend this Inklinks Project fellowship into a new arena. And as some people already know, and others hopefully are finding out uh right now as we speak it into existence, uh, this Inkling's Project Fellowship, which for the past the first three years have been uh directed solely towards college and university faculty from all over the globe, now is moving into for 2026 through 2028, a two-year fellowship being open to uh middle school and high school educators. And uh that'll be who the this cohort is comprised of, at least in this one year, and they'll actually be together for two years. Um, as I said, you as people are learning right now, you're you're you've been hugely helpful for helping us to think about this and to position it. But I'd love to hear from you why you think for this particular group of educators in middle school and high school, engagement with Lewis, and we're also including Tolkien in this too, for the fellowship, engagement for them, for their own professional and personal development, but then also for their craft of teaching at this in this particular uh role as educators of uh very young adults or emerging adults. What is the fruit that might be found there for them?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Yeah, it there's so much. And I it's such a rich opportunity, and I'm so excited for them to get this opportunity. And, you know, one of the things that that I found and we were chatting just briefly before we came on air about um how how beautiful a thing it is that these teachers, even though I'm I'm maybe handing them a huge book list and say we're gonna cover seven books in a week, you know, that's a that's a huge lift. It never feels like a chore to them. And that's one aspect I think that we can tend to underplay in the gift of formation that this this kind of opportunity can be. It is formative, but it is also, I like to think of it as a well-filling experience. Um we have the chance to go back to stories that maybe we loved as children, uh, but have never had the time to go back to and re-engage with. Um it's an opportunity to do something delightful. And maybe if you if you are teaching the works, it is an opportunity to deepen your appreciation for what you're teaching. Um but I do think that that a huge benefit of this is that nourishing the teachers themselves, right? And in a sort of both an intellectual way, but also just in this sort of spirit of delight, right, and joy and coming back to these works and getting to spend time with them and getting to spend time with their colleagues from all over the place, right? From all different institutions who are thinking about the same works and who are, you know, actively and imaginatively engaged with this. This is the kind of community that's that's just a beautiful gift, right? And so it's sustaining. And I think that that's that's one of the fruits that comes out of this. And I think uh, yeah, it's it's not necessarily an academic thing, but it's it's about flourishing. It's about it's about building community around around these great works and um and nourishing our own spirit in in this kind of you know, imaginative, it's almost like imaginative play, right? We get to come back to these amazing stories and really just immerse ourselves in these worlds again. And it's it's hard to understate how how much of a delight that is or overspeak, I suppose.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

No, this is this is one of the things we've been so delightful delighted about over the last few years in the Inklings Project. We call it a fellowship, and a and fellowship is one of the terms that gets used a lot, especially in college and university settings. You can have a fellowship which you know gives you a chance to dive into research with some funding or this, that, and the other thing. But it's actually really a fellowship in terms of developing relationships with other people who have distinct interests but also overlapping interests with you. And one of the things that's perhaps distinctive about what has come from the Inklinks Project Fellowship is that it's not competitive. Like you're not competing with each other, you're actually collaborating and co-creating and appreciating. Um, so I love that you bring that up. And I, and you know, we've we've had some time to share together in the fellowship this past year with other scholars from across the globe. And that's one of the things we want to offer to the middle school and high school teachers as well is an opportunity for a different kind of community, uh, a real fellowship built in friendship, intellectual friendship, um, professional friendship, uh, that can also be a wellspring of creativity for your own teaching, for your own service to your local community, for outreach efforts and things like that. Um, so I just I kind of rehearsed that so people uh might know about that aspect of it too. Maybe I could turn if I could turn that into a question, um, as you think back to your own experience as a fellow in the Inklings Project and with these other scholars and teachers from different uh disciplines at different universities. Is there something that you appreciated or drew from that setting and that that opportunity to do this with them?

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Yeah, it it was really a wonderful thing to get to meet so many new people from different places to hear about the work that they're doing, to bounce ideas off of one another, to kind of think outside the box on some questions, you know, as we kind of brainstormed you had a wonderful like list of discussion questions and as we were, you know, in our small groups and things like that, just to get to to explore different ideas with people who are who are truly delighted to be there and to be thinking about these things together. Um and I will say too, one of the things that I I particularly found delightful was getting to go to the Wade Center and to get to experience the archival research aspect, which um as as I tell people, you know, as a medievalist, getting to work with primary source type things, it's just like I live for that kind of stuff. So um, and getting to meet fellow medievalists who are also similarly as excited to be there with the, you know, it was just blanket blanket permission to geek to geek out together.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

100%.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Yes, yes. And that was so it was so cool. Well, you know, it that's that intellectual friendship, I think, that you were talking about. And yeah, um, yeah, the the ongoing kinds of conversations that are coming out of that, you know, with with various people. It's just it's just truly wonderful. Of things that, you know, why not? You know, why not continue these, these, you know, uh conversations and continue to bounce ideas and see what's possible. Um so that gift of, you know, getting to meet people that otherwise I would never have in a million years gotten the chance to to meet and talk to. Um, that's truly the gift, I think, of one of uh something like this. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Well, we'll certainly include in our show notes some uh links to information about the Inklings project and this particular fellowship that's coming up. But Shannon, you're also always involved in a number of other things as well, creative work, uh creative scholarly work. We want to share a little bit of that as uh in addition. Could you share with us maybe one or a couple of things that you're also giving your time to now that you might be excited about?

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Yeah, absolutely. No, I as you say, I am, you know, one of the things I I love doing, uh finding a kindred spirit in C.S. Lewis, I think, as a not just as a you know, an academic and and someone who is working sort of on that side, um, but also someone who does a lot of work, did a lot of work right on the on the creative side. And and I kind of take my uh, in a sense, encouragement from that model. So, so yeah, I am a writer myself, and so I I've engaged in a number of creative projects at the moment, uh, but the one I'm excited about right now um is developing a series, a film series on on the Holy Eucharist. And that's kind of the next big project, I suppose, on the slate at the moment. Um and yeah, that's currently in in development, and and we're we're excited. Like it's it's it's truly uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

And this is a fun project, yeah. The Adoro Tay project.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

The Adorite project, yeah. So it's it's uh telling the story of the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi, which um, you know, started not just with the miracle of Orvieto, but actually started with a nun in Belgium uh before that and the sort of tracing the history of that, but not just it, you know, sort of telling the historical story, but really my my interest is in telling that story through the lens of the art, the architecture, the poetry, the music that came out of that sort of cultural flourishing that came out of that. Uh so the great cathedral in Orvieto, the wonderful Eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, which forms the spine of the series and will hopefully inspire original score uh for the series as well. So things like that, and the poetry again, and and you know, the great works of art that have been inspired. Um just kind of exploring it through that lens, right? Um, again, kind of thinking about the the pathway to truth that leads through beauty um is is really kind of the heart of that particular series. So yeah, it's fun. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Well, dear listeners, if you are not in the habit of checking out the show notes and you're just listening, this would be an episode to check out the show notes too, because we'll click, uh we'll include a link that you can click to for some of the information on uh Shannon's work in it, including this work on this new film series, Adoro Tay, and we'll include uh information on the Inklinks project and this new fellowship that has the call for proposals out right now. Those are due in. I should probably know this. I think it's August 1st, uh, but I'll make sure that that is absolutely correct when I link it there. It is August 1st. I just looked uh over my shoulder. I got that right. It's good because I helped to set that date. So it's good that I know.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

It's always good. All right.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

Well, Shannon, thanks so much for this wonderful conversation for breaking open a little bit of your work with us. It's been so great talking with you.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

Oh, it's always a delight talking to you. Thank you for having me today.

SPEAKER_02 37:44

Absolutely. And thanks to all of you, as always, for joining us on Church Life today.

SPEAKER_01 37:51

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