Could be a plane, could be a long drive, but wherever I am, I’m out there connecting with patriots who love faith, family, and freedom just like you do.
I never want this channel to go dark just because I stepped away from the studio.
So, my team and I set aside this special session in advance for days just like this.
So, tell me in the comments where you are watching from and how you’re living out faith, family, and freedom right where God planted you.
This movement does not pause when I travel.
It keeps going because you keep going.
God bless.
Thank you so much.
It’s uh it’s wonderful to be here.
Um you know, I I’ve never been to Hungary before.
I’ve been looking so forward to this because I’ve been studying uh Budapest and its architecture from from afar.
And uh uh I uh I left the United States as Steven, but I’m coming back as Ishtvan.
So my life has changed and thank you for that.
Um, and I’m also uh I’m very excited to be here too because as you know um Hungary uh has become very famous around the world particularly among like American conservatives for its commitment to cultural and civilizational renewal and uh and it’s been very inspiring uh particularly for Americans to to see a country rise out of the ashes of decades of war and Soviet occupation and an astonishing return to its original Hebsburgian grandeur.
Uh, and now I’m getting to see it firsthand.
Uh, and so I’m like a kid, we call it in in the in English, a kid in a candy store.
I just feel like everywhere I look um the view I get the view of the parliament building from my room and I got up very early this morning because I’m a little jetlagged and the sun was rising and it was it was uh shining off the the Danube and I’m just looking at the Parliament building.
I’m just saying.
Thank you, God.
This is the most It’s just so wonderful.
And you know, it’s wonderful what you’re doing as well because there’s something here that I think many other cities have lost.
A sense that a civilization built something permanent and something that was meant to proclaim who you are, what you believe, and how those beliefs are as timeless as the stone structures that embody those beliefs.
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But I want to ask you a question.
A city can rebuild its cathedrals.
It can restore its castles.
It can restruct re uh construct its facades and its colonates.
All of which are very um amazing for an American since our oldest buildings are a hundred years old.
But the real question then is where does the soul of the civilization live? Where is civilization actually formed? And our classical forefathers, the great philosophers of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome had a profound answer to that question.
A civilization is ultimately formed in our children, our pedya, and that means it’s formed in our education.
So I think that’s why we’re here today.
the the the same civilizational impulse that’s rebuilding the castles and and and the cathedrals is also rebuilding our education.
The cathedral and the classroom are not separate projects.
They’re two expressions of the same idea.
You can’t have one without the other.
And what I hope to show in our two sessions together is that we’re all here part of an astonishing civilizational renewal that’s happening all over the world for good or for bad.
So scholars from a number of different disciplines, post-secular studies, demographic studies, sociology, geopolitical theorists, they’re all together recognizing from their own disciplinary vantage point that the world is going through a profound transformation.
the great secular experiment, that confident enlightenment wager that modernity would slowly but surely dissolve faith, drain the cathedrals, empty the seminaries, and leave humanity in a disenchanted world governed by technique and managed by experts.
That experiment is failing.
It looked like it was going to win for some time.
No question.
But scholars all over the world are admitting the experiment has never been as weak as it is now.
And this is largely because we’re seeing nothing less than the great ancient civilizations of the past uh in almost sorry I like anime kind of like kaiju like fashion rise up from the depths below and returning in all of their splendor all over the world.
Confucian China, Hindu India, Shinto Japan, Ottoman Turkey, political Islam, and most especially what I hope to show today, the rise of a new Christendom, a vast and vibrant Christian civilization.
And there are numerous explanations as to why this is happening, why the world is returning to the great civilizations of the past.
There’s the Russian American sociologist Peter Sorikin who founded the sociology department at Harvard back in 1930.
He seems to be closest to the mark in his profoundly insightful conception of how civilizational life works out.
So he argued that all civilizations eb and flow back and forth between the sacred and the secular, what he called the ideational and the sensate.
But for Sorin, what’s key here is that all civilizations are rooted in religion because religion provides an eternally sacred source for continuous societal renewal.
But all societies also entail a kind of secular domain as well where we have to figure out how to eat and build and defend and solve problems and deal with life’s endless adversities.
But what’s key here is that the secular domains of society are always without exception built on the foundation of the sacred.
Such that the secular functioned a lot like a temporal spatial material manifestation of the eternal spiritual immaterial sacred.
For Sorin, the society begins to go secular when its temporal spatial material life takes on a life of its own.
It amputates itself.
It separates itself from its sacred source.
So for example, the Harvard law historian Harold Bur Burman has shown how western civil law is actually rooted in medieval canon law.
the law of the medieval church.
But what Burman recognized was that over time increasingly the practice of civil law took on a conceptual autonomy and and eventually it became secularized.
It completely dislodged itself from any recourse to its sacred source.
The problem according to Soricanin is and he says we see this over and over and over in history in the Roman Empire for example is that the secular in dislodging itself from the sacred dislodges itself from the eternal source of societal renewal.
And as such the secular always inevitably withers.
It shrivels and it begins to slowly but surely die.
It collapses.
And that seems to be what’s happening today as scholars are increasingly recognizing that this modern world that in many ways began in the 18th century enlightenment has reached its limits and it’s just beginning to wayne.
It’s beginning to it’s beginning it’s exhausting itself.
But again, what’s so fascinating in all of this, as Sor can notice, the sacred roots, the religious foundations of society don’t die.
And why is that? Well, it’s because they’re eternal.
They can’t die.
At most, they can be replaced.
like when we saw the Roman pagan empire replaced as it were with the Roman Christian Empire.
The religious foundations of societies really do provide eternal resources for societal renewal.
And so what we’re seeing today is as the secular world rots, it’s turning into a kind of global compost that’s reawakening the seeds that are blossoming all over the world.
the sacred seeds and restoring the great ancient civilizations to prominence once again.
That’s Orin’s explanation.
Either way, civilizations appear to be back.
And we’re seeing it here in Hungary.
We’re seeing it in Poland and we’re seeing it in the rise of what scholars call civilizational populism that’s sweeping particularly the European continent.
But then that brings us back to our original question.
Where does the soul of a civilization live? Or as Sorcin might ask, where is the sacred source of civilization preserved and maintained regardless of what’s happening around us? And what I hope to show you in our time together is that you are that soul.
You as administrators and educators, you provide the indispensable role of forming your students.
Not merely filling them with information, not merely preparing them for careers, but making them into a certain kind of person.
A person who knows what’s true, who recognizes what’s beautiful, who understands what’s good, and who has the moral and intellectual courage to defend all three.
Every civilization that’s ever endured has had at its center an institution whose task was the formation of that kind of person.
The Athenian Gymnasium, the Medieval Cathedral School, Calvin’s Geneva Academy.
When those institutions weakened, the civilization hollowed out.
But when they’re renewed, the civilization rises again.
And you are that renewal.
The politicians may get the headlines and the generals get the monuments, but we as teachers, it’s always been the teachers.
I mean, Christ was referred to as rabbi, teacher.
We’re the ones who decide what the next generation loves.
And what a generation loves, it will fight for, it’ll build for, and it’ll sacrifice for.
And that’s why you’re here.
That’s why your work matters.
And that’s why I want to argue that the classical Christian education renewal is the heart of any worldwide civilizational restoration.
I want to start with what seems to be a deceptively simple question.
Admittedly, it’s in English, of course.
Um, and then I I want to ask my Hungarians here a little question because I’ve been doing a little uh a little research here and see if my research was right.
What precisely is education? Gang, if you enjoyed this lecture, there’s more to it.
Part two drops this Thursday, June 4th.
Don’t miss it.
