John Senior and the Restoration of Realism

John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Father Francis Bethel, O.S.B.

This is our kind of book. And we agree with Alice von Hildebrand’s foreword, which claims that it “should be in the hands of every educator and every parent.” We’d add that it ought to be in the hands of anybody and everybody who cares about culture, be they carpenter or attorney, computer geek or luddite. This is the story of a seed that was planted at the University of Kansas in the 1970s: the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (“IHP”). According to Fr. Bethel, the program was built on the tenet that reality is real, a “revolutionary” fact for modernity, which was communicated in IHP through the prose, poetry, music, architecture and art of Western culture, in conjunction with the book of Nature. This seed seemed to have been squashed when the program was shut down by the state, due to “controversial” conversions to the Catholic faith and young men being “brainwashed” into exploring the Christian vocation of monasticism. Despite the state’s attempt to destroy this seed, however, that group of young men went on to become monks at the French medieval Benedictine Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault. In 1999, those same monks moved back to the U.S., near Tulsa, OK, where the original seed blossomed into a new full-blown monastic community: Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey. Almost two decades later, that abbey has grown into the heart of a growing community of lay people who participate in the monastery’s thriving liturgical life. That seed has also blossomed in many other ways, including the creation of schools inspired by its curriculum (including Eighth Day Institute’s vision for a catechetical Academy), and the publication of the delightful novel and international bestseller The Awakening of Miss Prim, which can be read as an imaginative portrayal of IHP in action. But Fr. Bethel’s book is much more than the story of a blossoming seed, and certainly more than a mere biography of John Senior, the primary catalyst for IHP. It might be better considered a study of John Senior’s thought, which Fr. Bethel summarizes as Senior’s realization that in order for humans to fulfill their vocation of tending toward and shining like the stars, they must be nourished in the real soil of this world, that “we must ground all intellectual and affective life on the experiential and imaginative level.” Realism was the primary key to Senior’s mature thought and the guiding principle for his development of IHP. And it’s best articulated in the title of this book’s introduction: “Made for the Stars but Rooted in the Soil.” John Senior’s life and work remind us of what we’re made for and where we come from. And Fr. Bethel’s book is a testament to and inspiration for that vocation. It really ought to be in everyone’s hands, including yours.

452 pp. cloth $49.99

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