Fighting for the Real: Jeanne Schindler on Presence, Technology, and the Life We Share

Christine Perrin (00:00)
This is Christine Perrin, host of Composed, a timeless way of living, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute that explores living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, and draws the classical tradition into contemporary times. Jeannie Schindler, thank you so much for speaking to me today on Composed.

Jeanne Schindler (00:23)
It's pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Christine Perrin (00:26)
Likewise,

it's my pleasure. I'm going to read your formal bio and then we'll hear a little bit from you about how you got to this persona and place. Formerly an associate professor at Villanova University, Dr. Jeanne Schindler is a fellow of John Paul II Institute. Her intellectual interests are interdisciplinary, integrating philosophy, theology and political science. Dr. Schindler has lectured and published in a variety of areas, including Catholic social thought,

and democratic theory. She has been a homemaker and homeschooler since 2013. So we always have these nice little boxes around our biography. And that's a wonderful one with a lot of stories embedded in it. But I'd love to hear a little bit about how you came to be that person and what prepared you to do those kinds of things from your youth.

Jeanne Schindler (01:20)
I'm happy to answer this question. It gives me a chance to walk back a little bit. I would say what prepared me for graduate school, for the interest in going to graduate school, and for the intellectual life generally, was the example of my parents. I grew up in a home where there were scads and scads of books. My parents were reading all the time. And though I watched an

unbelievable amount of television. Growing up, it's so shameful. Nevertheless, some of the programs that I watched with my parents, I think shaped me. For instance, we would routinely watch what was then called the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, followed by Crossfire on CNN and the McLaughlin Group. Crazy programs for ⁓ a young person, early adolescent to be watching, but I loved it. I loved watching these news programs and kind

Christine Perrin (02:08)
Interesting. These were.

Jeanne Schindler (02:18)
political debate shows with my parents. And then I would go out and meet my friends. So I would say I was surrounded by books and reading materials. And then when I went to college, I was a history major, and my specific focus was on intellectual history. But I came to realize that that discipline was really a genealogy of ideas, how ideas were passed from one generation to another. And then in junior year of college, I took a course called Elements of Political Theory.

And it really did, it sounds cliched, but it really did change my direction because the questions that had been asked in intellectual history were now asked as living questions. It was a real question. Is there human nature? If so, what does it look like? How do we live together well? What are the pressing issues of social life? How do we form a government? What kind of government best suits human nature? Those kinds of things. And they incorporated philosophy and theology.

because all of those questions took their bearings from these fundamental questions about the world and whether there was a creator and if there was a creator of what sort. So that whetted my appetite for political theory and that's what I went to graduate school in. But I have to say, Christine, from about the time I was in fourth grade, I remember having conscious thoughts about being married and having children.

And I always wanted to be married and have children. And my stuffed animals were, I would, know, play house and my stuffed animals would be my children. And I would also teach them. I was their teacher. I had about 30 stuffed animals and I would line them up in what was our little home. And I would teach them and they didn't do very well. What with the lack of a brain, but it was just this, this, have such tender memories of that.

just being surrounded by these stuffed animals that were my children. And I always had, I would say, as my heart's desire to get married and have kids. So fast forward to my academic position at Villanova, I was in the same department as my husband. He actually hired me and then proposed to me. We got married and we started having children. I was of, as the obstetrician puts it, of advanced maternal age.

I mean, in fact, the term is geriatric. And I kid you not, it's such an inhospitable term, but I was of advanced maternal age. so we really wanted to start our family right after we got married. And we did, and we didn't use childcare. My husband, as I noted, was also a professor. So we would just...

tag team and go to the university and teach and then come home and one, you know, so our kids were with one or the other, their mom or their dad. But I realized after submitting my tenure dossier, when I was in labor with our third child, I realized, wow, I want to be home. I want to be home. My people need me. So we had three kids, three and under when Ava was born. And I did get tenure.

which was gratifying, but far more gratifying to me was being home with my children and being the center of the home and having my center of gravity in the home to be with them from morning till night in the rhythm of their day. I always felt that I was giving short shrift either to my students or to my family. So I taught for another year and then decided to step out of the academy and then begin our home academy and

We started homeschooling when my oldest child was five, so he was in kindergarten. And homeschooling has been one of the richest ventures of my whole life. I loved being a teacher at the university level. That was really important and was satisfying, but nothing has compared for me to how gratifying homeschooling and homemaking has been. It's just, it's so interesting to me.

and I'm reading things that I never read. I mentioned the fact that I watched endless amounts of television. As a child, Christine, I'm gonna be paying for that for my whole life because there are huge lacunae in my background, in the formation of my mind, my soul, my imagination. But homeschooling has been reparative and restorative.

because I have been able to enjoy these great stories with my children. And so that's, I would say, how I came to this point.

Christine Perrin (07:10)
That is such a rich narration that is already giving me a lot of questions on top of the ones that I came in with. First of all, I'd like to point out to the people listening, some of your language, which I think is lovely. Center of gravity is one phrase. Another is daily rhythms and the way that those two ideas, I think is really animating this conversation. But I wonder...

Jeanne Schindler (07:35)
Yeah, I think that's right.

Christine Perrin (07:39)
Who were the people that ever gave you this thought? Was this sui generis? I mean, your stuffed animals, your... That they don't have a brain. Your concrete experience, you know, after, with your fourth child. Did you ever have a model? Did you ever have anyone say anything? Did you ever look at something and say, don't want that on the basis of what you were seeing in other people's lives?

Jeanne Schindler (07:47)
They give me this thought.

I would say my strongest positive inspiration was one of my sisters who had six children, six boys. And we only have three, not four. Okay. And she was new to homeschooling when we got married, my husband and I got married, but it just seemed like such an intriguing endeavor. And so that put me in mind of it. And then I explored various curricula, met more homeschoolers. When I was still teaching at Villanova, there was a

a vibrant homeschooling community up in the Philly area. And Christine, you'll appreciate this. think one of the main sources of inspiration for those moms up in Philly was Charlotte Mason. And I had never heard of her before, but I started to investigate her approach to learning and it made my heart sing. I was so inspired by it. And your listeners might already know this anecdote from Charlotte Mason's life.

But when she opened her teaching college, her first crop of young teachers were very eager and they were in this introductory session. And Miss Mason asked them, why are you here? And one timid young lady raised her hand, know, mustered up the courage to speak and said, to learn to teach. And Miss Mason gently corrected her and said, no, you're here to learn to live. That gives me so much hope because

I'm and I feel like I still need to learn to live. I'm still shoring up habits, ⁓ exploring new fields. One of Mason's great insights is that to learn is to make connections. It's a science of making connections. And what Mason is concerned about is that not sort of the amount of data as if we were supercomputers, the amount of data in our heads, but

how much we care about, not how much we know about or store in our database, but how much we care about and how many orders of things we care about, this what John Henry Newman would call a connected view of things. That's how I want to live now. And even though homeschooling has helped me to fill in a lot of the gaps in my own education, now I feel primed and ready to really be educated. Another of Mason's phrases is,

All education is self-education. I'm now at the point where I want to really embrace this and I'm hungry for learning about everything.

Christine Perrin (10:44)
That's really helpful. Just recently was at an AI retreat conference kind of thing and I gave a talk on Beauty First Pedagogy and my main, I referenced Charlotte Mason and John Henry Newman because my thinking is, especially as AI and the kind of machine and content-based focus enlarges, the relational has to enlarge or actually has an opportunity to become more prominent because

We've perhaps been blending them a bit. And I think that this anthropology and telos that is who we are and where we're headed is so much more front and center in the relational model of education. ⁓

Jeanne Schindler (11:29)
Absolutely. And let's link this more broadly to what makes life worth living and meaningful. There was a great sociologist, I'm sure you've heard of him, but for your listeners, they really should run, not walk to get this book. It's called The Quest for Community, written by Robert Nisbet. Nisbet published The Quest for Community in the 50s. If you're able to track down, I think it's the 1971 edition where he writes a new forward.

He has some extraordinary insights. So this is well before the invention of the laptop, well before, needless to say, the invention of the smartphone, well before the invention of AI. Nisbet says that for any institution, let's think about the institutions that matter to you and to me and to, I'm sure your listeners, the home, marriage, family, the church, the school, whether it be a brick and mortar school or the home school.

Each of those institutions, according to Nisbet, has to have functional significance in addition to affective significance. To put it slightly differently, for people to care about something, a relationship, an institution, an enterprise of some kind, it has to be functionally significant and irreplaceable. So in the age of AI, when so many things

can be and, alas, I think will be replaceable with a machine. We have to turn back to those things that cannot be in principle replaced by a machine. They will always retain their functional significance. And so there's the possibility that they will always retain their affective significance. In other words, they will make a claim on us. We will have affection for them. We want to devote ourselves to them.

And I remember being at a conference where I was in conversation with a then young scholar and I mentioned Nisbet's observation. And I said to him, what are some things that the family can provide that no other thing, no other machine, no other impersonal agent can provide? And he thought for a moment, I thought this was lovely. He said, we can make music together.

Christine Perrin (13:52)
Huh.

Jeanne Schindler (13:53)
that in the home we can make music together. That can't be expropriated from us. That can't be taken from us. Those kinds of things, those real face-to-face relationship building activities, those are precious and we can safeguard those and they will last. But they'll take effort to be protected.

Christine Perrin (14:15)
Yes. What a surprising, wonderful answer. and I love, too, your focus on what cannot be replaced, what's lasting. It's not just a negative response to something and a fear response. It's a positive embrace of life, as you started this portion of the conversation saying.

Jeanne Schindler (14:21)
Not in that.

Hippie.

Christine Perrin (14:43)
And I think I would want to take this moment to just say that you've been trying to do a lot of work in your own home, but also in your community, and now it's spread beyond your community, in an attempt to offer this to other people as a thought category and something they can act on. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Just your own, the habits that you've seen are life-giving to your own home related to technology.

and the way you've tried to share that with others.

Jeanne Schindler (15:15)
Yes, I'd be happy to. If I could add two quick footnotes to what I had said previously, as examples of things that cannot be replaced, cannot be replaced by machines. Every single day in the Wall Street Journal, there are articles about AI and chat, GPT, and various technologies taking over various functions, and in certain instances, doing it better than a human being could do. Now, I think that's debatable, but it's...

The prospect is, I think, real. A machine can never administer a sacrament. The liturgy will always be personal, both human and divine. These are things that give our life the deepest meaning, and so we don't have to be afraid that they will be eclipsed. And I'd like to give you, if I may, two examples. One is just a very simple thing that when you are in pain,

I had an experience where there was some emotional pain with one of my children recently, and I just gave him a hug. I mean, just a full-on hug. This is an adolescent boy, not terribly inclined to receive a hug from his mom, but it mattered, and it was real. That can never be replaced. And the second thing is that one of our neighbors lost her husband. He was in his late 70s, and he was being cared for in the home. And he died, and she called me. And I...

brought my kids over there and the corpse was 10 feet away from us and we said a rosary together. And it was just so real. Just the body of Christ being together, it's absolutely incarnational and it cannot be replaced. No chat bot will comfort you. So those are the kinds of things that we can do. My kids, I think, were able to enter that because

in part because of our approach to technology that we've taken in the home and tried to foster in our community. When our oldest was in eighth grade, one of his friends relayed to him that he was going to get a smartphone. And I remember talking to my husband that night saying, you have to be proactive about this because we had no intention of giving our kids smartphones. But we realized as the old expression goes, nature abhors a vacuum.

You can't have vacuity in your life, socially, emotionally, intellectually. Things will rush in to fill those voids because we're made for fullness, for abundance. So we had to be proactive and positive. and Christine, the irony of this is not lost on me, but I sent an email to two listservs that I'm on. One homeschooling listserv and the other largely a parish-based women's listserv.

And I just invited any parents who were desirous of considering the possibility of postponing their children's use of phones to come for ⁓ a coffee and dessert reception. Well, 24 couples showed up in our living room. Yes. And that was in November of 2021. And out of that was born what we've dubbed the Postman Pledge community. After we had two sessions and after the second session, I stayed up

into the wee hours and I drafted a pledge because we needed to make something concrete. We needed to sort of firm up our common intention with something that we could sign onto and that would in a certain sense keep us accountable. And many of us in that group really admire Neil Postman and his work. And I thought it was cool just to have the alliteration. So I drafted the Postman pledge and at the heart of the pledge, as you probably know if you've seen it,

is an affirmation of the goodness of the world. That's absolutely the fundamental plank of the pledge. The world is good, and God is good. And we're here to celebrate God and what he has created. So that's the heart of the matter. How do we do that? We do that by cultivating habits that enable us to live in the world well. And specifically in this age, because I think these are threatened,

We have to cultivate habits of presence and attention. And because we've tried to do that in our home, I think my kids have an affectivity that's alive. So my son can receive a hug. I don't want to whitewash the challenges we have in our home. They are legion. But in that moment, he was receptive. Because we've cultivated habits of presence and attention, we were all able to

to minister to our neighbor who was grieving the loss of her husband and to be in a setting that was uncomfortable and not have to retreat into our phones. Why? Because we don't have them. But also because we haven't trained ourselves in that way to numb out or to seek distraction. We also don't have a television. And I think that has helped. We have a monitor and I think our kids watch way too many movies. So they're not.

devoid of that, and they have our oldest to have email. So they're connected, but they're not dominated by technology. And so they have so many real experiences to draw upon when they think about the world, when they think about themselves. And to give you an example with the Postman Pledge, because our focus is, let me put it this way, Christine, because the restrictive planks of the pledge, so to

not to give our kids smartphones or let them use social media for the next year. People have to reevaluate this, know, prudentially, and that makes sense. Those negative planks are in the service of the positive planks, the positive convictions about the goodness of the world and about how we function well together as a community. How do we do that? We do that through friendship. And how do we build friendship? Rich, robust friendships with

texture and dimensionality through natural, traditional means that human cultures have always undertaken. Through meals together, we always have a massive potluck associated with almost every one of our events. Through dancing together, none of us except for one family knew how to dance when we started this crazy enterprise. And now, four and a half years in,

we can actually do some of the steps in Scottish country dancing, square dancing, swing. The swing is a big thing now with our teenagers especially. So we dance together, we make music together, we have music nights, and we started two tracks from fairly early on. One is for families for these large activities like the dancing field days and picnics and that sort of thing. But then we also have a

companion track for parents and older teens, depending on the subject matter, which we're calling, for lack of better term, continuing cultural formation. And there we invite speakers just into our home for a conversation about some important topic. We have addressed gender ideology, for instance. And we invited a fellow who's working in the field, mean, absolutely in the trenches in terms of legislation and policy.

And he was accompanied by a philosopher who talked about the question of gender and the question of ideology. What happens when you pair those? We had an architect working in sacred architecture talk about the elements of classical architecture. Just in January, we launched sort of a new series that's called the Why Fill in the Blank Matters. So the first inaugural session of that series was

called Why Music Matters. And we invited two families, two Postman Pledge families, to come and talk about why music matters to them, including their children. So there were two parents in each family and four kids, all of whom are musical. And everyone, they all chimed in as to why music matters to them. And then they gave a house concert. ⁓ It was delightful. And we had 50...

We had to cap it because we couldn't accommodate any more than that. But we had parents and kids old enough to appreciate both the presentation and the music. And I'll never forget it. People were so delighted they performed an encore. And these are just people in our community.

Christine Perrin (24:12)
I really love the fact that you're giving us a list of concrete things that you do. And while the lecture series may be a bit erudite for many people to pull off based on the community that they live in or the friends that they have, these activities that you're naming are very accessible to all of us. They're hosted. We could show up, you know, in addition to trying to cultivate them in our own home. But I noticed that

when we were getting our tech figured out, you said, I don't have a smartphone. I can't do that. And I thought a lot of people say don't give smartphones to kids. mean, that was not the case when my kids were being raised. They were new and you were supposed to give them to your kids so they could find.

Jeanne Schindler (25:00)
And the content, they were assuming that the content was benign, or if the content were benign, the medium didn't matter.

Christine Perrin (25:08)
Yes,

but few people even now say you also ought not to have one. And that seems to me as I'm hearing you talk a theme that this recognition that the adults need the same medicine that the students need.

Jeanne Schindler (25:25)
That's exactly right. The way I put it to a group of folks with whom I was speaking recently is that if a smartphone isn't good for a four-year-old or a 14-year-old, maybe for the same reasons it's not good for a 40-year-old. And I think we need to revisit this. Yes. Because we are the exemplars for our children and for everyone around us. On the bus, waiting in the doctor's office, at church.

I'm increasingly seeing people whip out their smartphones in mass, and that's very disturbing to me. I even wrote to our pastor that I was afraid of what I called screen creep into the sanctuary. It's powerful not only for children and young people, it's very powerful for adults. It's a magnet, and it will start to undermine the habits of attention and presence that we have developed. And in some cases, we've developed them by dint of the fact that

these technologies didn't exist. I I had the television and I was glued to the television, but I realize, and I realized this actually by high school, by late high school, I would say, though I didn't have the will to do anything about it. I realized that there was a poverty in that and that I was losing something important, but I didn't know what to fill it with. I didn't know what to fill the vacuity with.

Christine Perrin (26:48)
I think that's a really key point that people are not talking about as much. also think that you're saying it's not that some people have enough self-control. It's that the nature of this tool is that it takes over in certain forms and you have to do very radical things, cut off your arms, put out your eyes, so to speak, in order to avoid it. And I think that, you know,

I love what you say too, that when we bring it into a room with us, certain things come into that room. Yes. That we can't use the strength of our character in the moment to overcome.

Jeanne Schindler (27:32)
That's right, because it's undermining it constantly. my father-in-law was really profound. My late father-in-law, David L. Schindler. And he said when he surveyed the scene, he died three years ago, but he lived long enough to see the advent of the smartphone and to see what it was doing to communities, families, his students. And he made a distinction between a moral objection

to the smartphone and what he called the ontological character of the smartphone. And he made the point that, even if the content is benign, even if it were positively edifying, the nature of the technology itself would undermine the value of that transmission. And I'm seeing that vindicated all the time.

Christine Perrin (28:27)
This connects to what Marshall McLuhan says too about the medium is the message. you flesh that out for people a little bit?

Jeanne Schindler (28:35)
Yes, absolutely. In fact, Neil Postman, who was a media critic, professor of communications, was a great devotee of Marshall McLuhan. As you mentioned, Marshall McLuhan had this famous adage, the medium is the message. Let me make this very concrete because I thought of this the other day and it's registered and it's been helpful for me. Imagine if a great moment in your life.

something like graduated from college. Imagine if what had formerly marked that great event had changed and the symbol of a beautiful diploma written in calligraphy, written on sheepskin, let's say, mounted with matting in a beautiful frame, because it's an achievement. It's important achievement that demands recognition.

What if that were for all kinds of good reasons, efficiency, cost, for let's say environmental reasons, what if that were now transmitted to you as a QR code? So you didn't get a diploma or you didn't get a marriage certificate or you didn't get a baptismal certificate. You were sent a QR code that could still be registered various places. The medium would be the message. What would the message be? This is not really that important.

I get it. It's like a menu at a restaurant. It's like a coupon, right? It's, you know, Bed Bath and Beyond, 20 % off coupon. Just scan your phone. We can't, the phone has a leveling effect. The medium itself has a leveling effect. And I think we need to resist that.

Christine Perrin (30:03)
like a menu at a restaurant.

have another example to add to that. I was in college, listened in particular, I listened to NPR a lot. And as I became older, I remember, well, even now, I'll just say when I listened to NPR, I find the medium of switching from one subject to the next with equal intensity of voice ⁓ dehumanizing because you know, on one

One moment, and I think I realized this, you there's a genocide going on here that's being described. And then the next thing is some cartoon about some funny thing that's happening. Exactly. And the switch from one to the other is so fast and it's such a short period of time. And it feels this juxtaposition is so demeaning to the gravity of the first.

Jeanne Schindler (31:16)
is.

is

exactly, and the way I would put it with respect to handheld devices, is that it degrades the distinctions of social space. So now that you can have in your hand the vehicle to take you anywhere at any time to do basically anything, no space matters. The differences among spaces don't matter. I was at a conference a while back and I had given a talk about the

dangers of technology, and we were at this lovely dinner and people were on their phones. These are adults. These are middle-aged and older adults with very significant positions. Yes. Who have a lot of learning and they're being reduced to adolescence because they can't resist the need to be in constant connection with other people to be

constantly, to have their existence in a certain way, constantly ratified and shored up. Yes, I'm still connected. I still matter. And I said to my husband after we came back, so just tacking back to the question of distinction of spaces, we're increasingly, and I think because of the phone, unable to recognize sacred space versus profane space. And by profane, I don't mean that I'm not using that in the pejorative, just secular space.

regular workaday space. Everyday space. What mature adult who's, let's say, let's take a best case scenario, because this actually happened recently at our parish, an adult who is following along with the readings and intends to actually be reading the scriptures. What adult is not going to check a text that comes in, kind of an emergency alert text that grandmother has come out of surgery well?

Christine Perrin (32:47)
free.

Jeanne Schindler (33:16)
or someone has coded on the table, right? You can't but want to attend to those other things because you're constantly being alerted to them. Even if you're entirely well intentioned and want to pay attention to the liturgy, the medium is going to interrupt that. And so it makes us increasingly ill-suited to receive what we need to receive and in the particular places and spaces that are different.

The inside of a church, the sanctuary is not the same as being on the playground, is not the same as being in the dining room. All of those different spaces require a different etiquette or protocol, and we're losing that almost entirely.

Christine Perrin (34:02)
That's really helpful. And I want to stay for a moment on the public concerns and the kind of political concerns, since this is something that you've thought about a lot. What do you think the implications are for this, for the public sphere? In particular, are you seeing things that correspond with this kind of problem?

Jeanne Schindler (34:28)
Christine, that is such an important question for our time, for this moment. What does it convey to a citizenry when you have the chief executive? And let's say, I mean, this habit, I think, can afflict both parties. So this is not a partisan remark. But when the chief executive uses Twitter, or something analogous, as a vehicle for promulgating

a change in public policy. What does that say about the gravity of the things public for the res publica? I think it's very serious. I think that this mode of conducting public discourse has so far degraded it that I'm not sure we can recover. And the very medium, because the medium

introduces a dopamine surge and because it's designed to keep attention, right, to sort of colonize one's attention, the message has to be repeatedly sensational, right? Serious matters of public policy, let's say water conservation, those types of questions will not stimulate the dopamine response.

in the way that a flashy headline will, a tweet, especially tweets that are salacious in some way about public figures, that mock, that degrade, but that try to grab attention. The fact that the bulk of our political discourse now takes that form is in part because of the medium itself.

Christine Perrin (36:12)
And you're suggesting that because our political system is set up on contributions and voting from everyone, that there's a sense in which if we lose the attention to attend to certain issues, we'll lose our form of government. That's right.

Jeanne Schindler (36:32)
We'll lose what it means to be a citizenry. And we're already losing what it means to have a civic life. Because to have a civic life means to have a common life, some space in which we are all interacting. And increasingly, let's say it's even something like cultural activities, but that we come together in common. ⁓ Let me give you an example, a secular example.

to take our children to the National Symphony. We're big, cheap skates, so we get in on this student rush ticket program. So $10 to hear Beethoven's Fifth, we took our kids. I mean, it was extraordinary. And I think all toll we paid with parking $50. You can't get Chipotle for our family for $50. And you were listening to this glorious music with people from all walks of life.

people from different races, from different classes, different ages. And yet, we have the phone. I had a woman sitting in front of me in clear view of my children who was on her phone almost the entire concert. That degrades our civic life. We were not there together. She was elsewhere.

Christine Perrin (37:54)
didn't have the same experience.

Jeanne Schindler (37:55)
We

didn't have the same experience. We weren't enjoying a concert because the concert should have been there, right? The concert was on the stage with the orchestra. And when that happens, and I'm seeing it increasingly, we lose our ability to share things in common.

Christine Perrin (38:12)
Could maybe even just list off some other things that we might share in common? I'm thinking of Mardi Gras, for instance, my friends that live in, especially in Louisiana. But what are some things that people used to share or could still share but are not sharing? Just so that those who would like to change that in their lives could attend.

Jeanne Schindler (38:37)
several things come to mind. So, parades in your town, parades in your city. Think of the Macy's Day parade, for instance, if you're in New York City. That has been, and I take it still is, legendary. Sporting events still bring people together. Concerts, festivals, all of those things I think are really important. Shakespeare in the Park. that brings people together.

Christine Perrin (39:00)
Shakespeare in the Park.

Jeanne Schindler (39:05)
and shores up our common identity as Americans. I think those things are very important. And they are also at the same time being put at risk because they are not as stimulating, right? For, I mean, in a certain way, neurochemical reasons, they're not as stimulating and they're not as easy as Christine Rosen put it, as frictionless as staring at your phone. It's much easier. And so we have to make an effort

to bring our kids to these public things, such that we have a sense that there is a res publica. There is something that defines us. This would be much easier, I think, if we had a traditional mode of building and of civic architecture and civic space. If I may give you an example, a couple of years ago, we took our kids to Europe, and they had never been there before. And our first stop was Rome.

Our apartment was two blocks away from the Piazza Navona. Our kids could walk out of the apartment and be in this glorious space that was so palpably public. It was lively. There were beautiful sculptures. There were fountains. The architecture around it was glorious. The Church of San Agnesi is there.

St. Agnes, and we walked by it and there was just a sandwich board, a humble little sandwich board with chalk writing on it. Vivaldi concert today at five. And I said to our gang, we went with my brother-in-law and his family, and I said to our gang, we have to come back for that. So we did various things in Rome and you're just surrounded by testimonies to our social nature, testimonies to our social life.

the fact that we are civic, we're meant to be together, to live together. And importantly, testimonies to the sacred that we're in via, we're en route to something transcendent. So we have a transcendent origin and a transcendent destiny. It's reinforced everywhere. Coming by that in a suburban housing development would be more difficult. But just tacking back to the example of Rome,

We did go to the concert. was a Vivaldi concert, all strings. The program was tried and true. It was the Four Seasons. It was in a small chapel in the Church of St. Agnes designed by Boramini. And we were about 10 feet away from the players. The lead violinist was, as my husband put it, the Eddie Van Halen of violin. He had so much energy. He was about...

It was electric and electrifying. I was so gratified because on our way out, my nephew, then 17, said, who too suggested this? That was amazing. And I said, Aunt Jeannie, because I had to score some points. Yeah, my kids. Yeah, right. But it was just the fact that we did this together. It was real.

Christine Perrin (42:15)
and for the next time.

Jeanne Schindler (42:23)
People were making beautiful music and it connected us with history.

Christine Perrin (42:27)
You're making me want to ask you what cities in the US have done a good job of creating public spaces and what if someone's listening and they have some influence on zoning or planning, what kinds of public spaces you wish every little town had. Obviously, the public of a suburban development is tougher because there is no center. That's right. I'm even thinking about Jane Jacobs and her

Jeanne Schindler (42:35)
question.

Christine Perrin (42:55)
idea of the ballet of the city streets. know, this is not necessarily fancy, something else.

Jeanne Schindler (42:59)
No. It

would be so simple. In fact, my son just returned from New York City last night. He's going to do a gap year with a lovely mission group called Consolazio. And he said, Mom, you wouldn't believe it. It was in Brooklyn, in a kind of edgy part of Brooklyn, where he stayed. And he described a park, just a city park. It was not Central Park. It was not the Piazza Navona. It was a...

very humble patch of grass with some trees and some gardens, you know, artfully arranged. So it had some, there was some thought here. This wasn't just an ordinary patch of grass at a bus stop. So there was some tending, there were benches, and he was surprised to see people reading, playing together, napping. And he said very few people were on their phones. And he was surprised at that.

But I think we're made for connection. We're made for it. And this is where, this is where the hope comes in. Our natures respond to what's good.

Christine Perrin (44:09)
That is remarkable. Say that again.

Jeanne Schindler (44:12)
Our natures respond to what's good. And we can take hope in that because we are designed by a wise and loving creator, by a father, who wants us to... The glory of God is man fully alive.

Christine Perrin (44:23)
right.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

Jeanne Schindler (44:29)
Yes, yes, absolutely. God wants us to thrive. But to thrive, because we're incarnational, we actually need to be sensitive to space and how we set it up, how we build, how we arrange. If I may come into your listeners' TED Talk by an architecture critic by the name of James Howard Kunstler, he wrote a very famous article in the Atlantic in the 90s called Home From Nowhere.

And he has two books similarly named, The Geography of Nowhere and then an expansion in his article. The larger book is called Home from Nowhere. Those are indispensable to understand what the scene has been with post-1940 zoning and how that has had really deleterious civic effects. It's evacuated our public life. On the positive side, you can point to, let's say A,

have been well-built cities like Boston for encouraging public interaction, public space. Chicago has beautiful areas for public space. Think about Grant Park, for instance. Philadelphia does. New York City, needless to say. But also smaller towns, like not too far from you, Kennet Square, Pennsylvania. need real city streets that are accessible, especially by

Christine Perrin (45:49)
Yes.

Jeanne Schindler (45:56)
pedestrians. So on foot, you need to encourage walking so people encounter one another and they encounter civic realities together, not in their own little pods.

Christine Perrin (46:08)
You're making me think of a town where my daughter lives 15 minutes from here. It's a borough and they, privately bought a piece of property and donated it to the town and they are building a little tiny city square and it has a grandstand for a little concert and it has tables built in with a patio and I'm hoping chess boards.

You know, that easy access minimums. Definitely the Piazza Navona is probably the maximum. But there's these minimums as well that are almost forgotten in our experience.

Jeanne Schindler (46:44)
That's right.

But they require consciousness. They require effort. I should add, by the way, Christine, lest your listeners turn on James Harden Conselers' TED Talk, it's not for kids. ⁓ Deploys some very colorful language, but beautifully. ⁓ And entirely appropriately to my mom.

Christine Perrin (46:54)
Yes.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

I've written it down. That's great. Thank you for these recommendations. There's a wonderful organization called the Center for the Examined Life or something like that. I ⁓ think a professor at Princeton started it. And one of the things that they do is to try to give people experiences of attention.

Jeanne Schindler (47:24)
I've never heard of

Christine Perrin (47:35)
so that they know then to go in search of more of those experiences. And I think I hear you talking a lot about, you didn't use this language, but how do you develop the muscle of attention? What has to be prohibited? What has to be included? What reward system kind of follows on that kind of an experience? And I just wonder if you could give us some exposure to that kind of thinking as well, just this what...

happens with the muscle of attention? Why is it like a muscle? And what kinds of things could we do just to begin developing it?

Jeanne Schindler (48:11)
that's good. I think the metaphor of a muscle is helpful for a couple of reasons. One is that we all have it or have them, right? We all have muscles. The question is how developed are they? A second reason it's helpful and hopeful is that there are tried and true ways of developing our muscles. And that is through the exercise of them in some fashion, depending upon where you start.

So the someone who has been largely inactive in terms of their musculature cannot begin to train for a marathon or to power lift. But he can take small steps. mean, this is true. mean, physiologically, this is true even of the elderly. They can start to build muscle. OK, so we can do very concrete things. In my own case, I don't use a smartphone.

but I'm tempted to check email 25 times a day. Rather than sort flagellate myself about that, what I've tried to do is just in the first place become aware of my inclination to go check email. And typically, and if I'm honest, I'm more inclined to do that if I'm trying to avoid something I need to do and something that's either tedious or actively unpleasant, okay? So awareness first.

and then some effort, some conscious effort. So I'll just kind of pull myself in a little bit and talk to myself, not berate myself, but talk to myself. Yes, this sounds really appealing, but let's do this other thing. Let's just kind of gently take baby steps and move into this task. And then there's a great tradition in my faith of just offering things up. It's a great Catholic phrase, offer it up.

So you can dedicate really tedious or unpleasant things. You can offer that up as a prayer. And those little sacrifices amount to a good bit. And you're building your muscle of resistance in one sense, but more positively, the muscle that will allow you to receive a receptive muscle. So a muscle that allows, let's say, a receptive organ to be working well, the organ of sight, let's say.

the organ of hearing. So you're receiving the world and then you can respond. And that's our vocation to respond to the world, to receive and respond. We receive our baptism, for instance, and then we respond with a new life.

Christine Perrin (50:49)
I heard you say that about your kids that they were able to enter the experience. It's like it's house you go into and...

Jeanne Schindler (50:54)
Yes, dear.

No, and Christine, it was so funny because we, so they were there, they were present, they saw this woman grieving. And then because our life, there was always some ridiculous element. We were saying a rosary with our neighbor, who's a fallen away Catholic, but she seems to be returning to the church. We started to say a rosary with her and she remembered it and she went and she grabbed a rosary, which was, mean, she dusted it off and it was so lovely. And then.

One of my kids started saying the Hail Mary, but then left out one of the lines in the first, like the first stanza as it were, and kept doing that repeatedly. And then my other kids, we looked at each other and then I started laughing. I mean, I could not. And my dear friend, she thought I was weeping. So it was all good, you know, because my shoulders were going up. I could not control myself because it happened over and over and over again. And my kids...

She knew that something was amiss, but she couldn't right herself in that moment. So we just kept it real and plowed along. it was just a beautiful, very human, incarnational moment, where it was just, we were present to each other.

Christine Perrin (52:13)
I love that. I'm wondering if there are any stories, whether that's, you know, their epic or fairy tale or even scripture that are guiding for you as you think about these subjects of attention, you know, focusing on the good as opposed to taking away always the bad. The res publica, the things that make us a community.

the human things that are ritualistic or liturgical or repeated in our lives that kind of create patterns for us. It's not just an act of our will. Are there any stories that help you with that or have helped you?

Jeanne Schindler (52:57)
And in fact, this brings together both my childhood and my children's childhood. When I was a kid, I read almost nothing. Now, as an adult, I have had the opportunity of reading the things that I should have read and now being absolutely delighted by them. And I think penetrating the deep meaning of them. To give you a simple example, there's a scene in...

the Little House series. It's after Mary has lost her vision and Pa asks Laura to be Mary's eyes. Shortly after that, they take a train trip, the first train trip they'd ever been on. And it was enormously exciting. Laura's capacity for observation and receptivity to the environment of a train car, of a passenger car, is extraordinary.

She narrates for Mary details which would be absolutely lost to most of us. Even those of us who hope to cultivate the faculty of attention. Her capacity for observation and narration, to use a Charlotte Mason term, is breathtaking. And it allows us, as well as Mary, it allowed Mary to enter the scene. It gave her a rich picture of this enterprise and this adventure that they were on.

And it allows us to enter that too. Likewise, if you read the autobiography of Helen Keller, what she was able to experience because she was present to the phenomenon, whatever it might be, holding a china cup, being out and rubbing the leaves of ⁓ a violet. She's able to enter and experience the world in a way that would be the envy of

all of us who are concerned about this question, how are we living and how is technology posing an impediment to a rich and full life? Those are very simple things and they're doable. We can do those. We can say to ourselves not in a shaming way, because I think that's, I'd like to take it out of a moral register.

and put it in a register, a sort of descriptive register about the nature of things and our nature so that we just say, okay, let's assess the nature of this thing. Let's assess what's in front of me. And then Christine, if I may mention two things, one is that we need to, as Brother Lawrence put it, practice the presence of God. We have to recognize that in every moment, in every situation,

We don't need to feel threatened by what we perceive to be vacuity. There's actual presence there. There's fullness there. There's the presence of God there. So we don't need to try to escape. Let's say we come home from work and the room that then the house is quiet. It's silent. We don't have to be afraid of that because there's actually a beneficent providence and presence there. The second thing is that

When we do feel a certain agitation, it could be the restlessness that attends the human condition, simply. The restlessness that Augustine experienced so humanly and so profoundly in the Confessions. I was very moved by the Confessions. I didn't read the Confessions until I was in graduate school, but it reads like a modern autobiography in a lot of ways. And he's so accessible because he's so honest about

about his longings and what he tried to fill those longings with that never satisfied. If we constantly run from the restlessness, constantly numb out from the restlessness, we will miss our great existential task. We need to press into the restlessness and allow it to motivate us to seek what will actually satisfy us.

Christine Perrin (57:12)
is that our task to seek what will satisfy.

Jeanne Schindler (57:14)
Yes, that is our task. That's our great human task. I'm afraid that we're distracted from that task. We're being numbed to it, to the existential urgency of that task.

Christine Perrin (57:30)
That's quite a summary of this discussion and of your work. I love that, to seek what will satisfy, especially in light of Augustine and some of the things that he said about that restlessness and the way that we've all felt it, and particularly in light of technology. At the beginning of our talk, when you were narrating your life, and I love sometimes to talk to you about narration, but you mentioned...

that you just became fascinated with the life of educating your children and the home and you're coming from a life that was important and self-important. know that world. I know that institution, all those things. Could you talk a little more as we finish about what fascinated you? What were you curious about? How did you bring those skills of functioning?

in a university world and observation and even study to the life of the home and what would you encourage people who are in that phase of life to look at?

Jeanne Schindler (58:40)
Last year, I undertook a nine-month novena. ⁓ A novena is a cycle of prayer that typically takes nine days. This is sort of the mother of all novenas. I began it on the Feast of the Annunciation, which is March 25th that's coming up. And I ended it on the Nativity. So it's a way of entering into the preparation for Christ's coming at Christmas.

And one of my, without disclosing all of my intentions, one of my intentions was that our home would be a place of learning and celebration. And that's the way I think on our better days, I think I've approached our homeschooling, that we always were learning something interesting. And then we always took a moment to celebrate in a certain respect, you know, by having a treat together or.

playing a game together. Mind you, there were tons of fights and I really do not want to paint an unrealistic picture. But what does that mean? It means that you're alive to this good world that God created. And so there is so much to celebrate. As the poet Robert Louis Stevenson put it in his very short poem, Happy Thought, the world is so full of a wonder of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. Christine, everything is interesting.

I have a sourdough starter that's fermenting on our counter. And last night I had to try to salvage this thing that I've poured endless amounts of money into using very good einkorn flour. I mean, it could all be a, just a lark, but I tried to salvage it. And then this morning I have, I've literally have probably poured $15 of flour into this, you know, this microbe. And I opened up the

the lid of the stuff I tried to salvage last night. And it had just been fermenting overnight. And lo and behold, there's a healthy culture there now. Right? That is fascinating. That's incredible. So everything is fascinating to me. And to advert to my father-in-law, again, he would always say that every single thing in the world, every part of creation is born of the wisdom

and the love of God. So it's not simply an intelligence, an abstract intelligence at work, but there's love behind it. There's a benevolent presence behind it. And I think that's the key. You need to encounter the world and understand the world as good and good for me. And if that's the case, then I can rest. I don't have to endlessly be constantly agitated.

in the restlessness that threatened to engulf Augustine, and I've experienced it, honestly, very profoundly in my life. That restlessness, that anxiety, agitation, sense of disquietude. But that's not at root who we are. That's not our foundational state.

Christine Perrin (1:01:50)
That's beautiful and helpful. I love the benevolent presence theme that you keep going back to. It would change our lives if we could imagine the world that way, imagine our empty rooms that way. I also am thinking about Joseph Pieper and his idea that, know, being is good. Aquinas says that.

Peeper says you have to be able to celebrate a feast to do any of the things that you're talking about, to make art, to have contemplation, to have religious experience. You have to be able to celebrate a feast. And I remember hearing that for the first time many years ago and thinking, what? What does he mean? But I think that you're talking about that. You're appealing that for us. yes, yes. Can you say what that means to you, that idea that Peeper encapsulates?

Jeanne Schindler (1:02:47)
Absolutely. So if we've talked about how the smartphone tends to have a reductive effect, it reduces all spaces. Everything becomes sort of monochrome to mix metaphors. It's all the same, right? Whether you're in church and you have your phone in front of you, whether you're on the playground, whether you're at the bus stop, the doctor's office, your bedroom. So spaces lose their distinctiveness.

and their distinctive function and meaning. So too, that can happen with technology and time, that it's a flattening. No time is any different than any other.

Christine Perrin (1:03:22)
24-7 convenience store.

Jeanne Schindler (1:03:24)
Yes, yes, exactly. And likewise, time can lose its distinctiveness. But that's not a human way to inhabit time. The human way to inhabit time is through seasons and seasonality and the liturgical season that tracks so beautifully the highs and the lows of an ordinary human life. The church understands that, that all time is not the same.

and that time has a direction. So we're constantly cycling back in a liturgical tradition like mine, Catholic tradition, we're constantly cycling back to the great mysteries of the faith, to the great feasts and fasts of the faith that correspond to the rhythm of an ordinary life. So it's not something that seems totally foreign or bizarre, but we do it together. And so we're marking time together.

and have a whole life cycle that we can celebrate together, recognize together. And one of the pastor had a great homily a few weeks ago. It was on the feast of the transfiguration. And he explained why the feast of the transfiguration is placed in Lent, which is this time of, it's a penitential season, the penitential season. And he said that the transfiguration was necessary for

the disciples to see for Peter, James, and John, to give them heart and hope for what was to come, because they were also going to be entering a great Lent. And then the Passion Tide, and to see their Savior, that this man to whom they had given everything, crucified. But that, they were still sustained by the Feast of Transfiguration, because they saw Christ in His glory.

and that could sustain them. And of course, this was accomplished and realized on Easter Sunday. So we need to understand this in a symbolic way, marked by even things like the colors in our home or the colors of our table, the colors in the way the church is decorated. We need to mark these times of desolation, of loneliness, of sorrow. And all of that, if we reckon with it well,

It can prepare us for glory.

Christine Perrin (1:05:52)
I think that's a good note for us to end on. Thank you for unfolding this hope that you have in front of our eyes and giving us a chance to do likewise in our own communities and cities and homes. Thank you.

Jeanne Schindler (1:06:12)
It's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much.

Christine Perrin (1:06:15)
Thank you, the pleasure is mine. You've been listening to Composed with Christine Perrin, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute about composing well-lived lives of virtue, craft, community, and delight.