/
RSS Feed
Episode Description
This week Ashley McGuire and Mary Fiorito welcome writer and mother Emily Zanotti, whose recent viral article in the National Catholic Register humorously captures the joys and trials of bringing small children to Mass. Emily shares the real story behind the now-famous photo of her young son kneeling piously at an All Souls Mass — a brief moment of serenity amid the chaos every parent knows well. She offers wisdom on handling judgment, seating strategies, cry-room etiquette, and creative ways to help little ones fall in love with the liturgy.
Our TCA chaplain Monsignor Roger Landry joins Betsy Fentress to help us prepare spiritually for Advent. He explains the three comings of Christ and shows how the season is less about penance and more about purifying our longing for God. Msgr. Landry offers practical advice for making Advent fruitful, from praying “Thy Kingdom Come” to letting the Advent wreath symbolize our growing desire for Christ’s reign in our hearts.
Ashley welcomes Meghan Cox Gurdon, children’s book critic and author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. Meghan explores how the digital world has only become more distracting and why the simple act of reading aloud is such a powerful antidote. From leveling the playing field in classrooms to synchronizing brain patterns and strengthening family bonds, she shares how reading together builds vocabulary, imagination, and culture in ways screens never can. Meghan cautions against the “dumbing down” of children’s books and encourages families to start a nightly read-aloud tradition this season.
Ashley and Mary share a reflection on manners as we head into Thanksgiving, describing etiquette as a form of charity – not a tool for conceit, but a way to make others feel at ease. In a culture that’s forgotten many basic courtesies, they suggest a renewed commitment to small acts of consideration that reflect the Christian call to love our neighbor.
Catch the show every Saturday at 7amET/5pmET on EWTN radio!
Bios
Alex Jones is an American business executive and entrepreneur, best known as the CEO and co-founder of Catholic prayer app, Hallow. NPR referred to him as “one of the most influential Catholics in the United States.” A former skeptic who rediscovered his faith through contemplative prayer and Lectio Divina, Alex left a career in consulting and tech to build a digital space where millions can encounter Christ in silence and Scripture. He now leads Hallow’s mission to help people “hallow” their lives by growing in a real, daily relationship with God. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame School of Engineering in 2015 and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 2020. Before launching Hallow, he worked professionally in consulting in Chicago at McKinsey & Co as an engagement manager. He lives in Chicago with his wife, daughter, and son.
Monsignor Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. In 2024, he was appointed the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA by Pope Francis. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and served as executive editor for the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. He is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God, and he leads pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and other sacred destinations. He was an on-site commentator for EWTN’s coverage of the 2013 papal conclave that elected Pope Francis. He is national chaplain for Catholic Voices USA and New York Chaplain for the Leonine Forum. Father Landry traversed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage in 2024, an event which coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood.
Meghan Cox Gurdon is a longtime book reviewer and weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering both children’s literature and adult titles. She is the author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. A mother of five, she writes and speaks widely about literature, family life, and the formative power of stories in a culture saturated with screens. Meghan’s work has appeared in numerous national publications, and she is a frequent commentator on education, culture, and children’s reading. A former foreign correspondent and magna cum laude graduate of Bowdoin College, she has five children with her husband, English journalist Hugo Gurdon. The family divides their time between Maryland and Maine.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 345 Transcript
| Ashley/Mary | Welcome to conversations with consequences now on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Ashley McGuire, and I'm Mary Fiorito. And we are delighted to welcome to the show today, Alex Jones, who is the CEO and co-founder of the helo app, which is an extraordinary app that has connected millions of people around the globe, Christians and non-Christian seekers who are interested in faith and looking for ways to deepen their prayer life and their relationship with God. Welcome to the show, Alex. |
| Alex Jones | Thanks so much for having me as an honor. |
| Ashley/Mary | So, Alex, we actually met recently at a dinner. Then I emceed, honoring, you. But the dinner was hosted by Catholic International University. And so I got a, preview of some of the interesting stories, behind the founding of how. And one that I was really surprised by and had not heard was the many, uphill battles and rejections you faced in founding. How so? Tell our listeners a little bit about where you got the idea to start this app and, some of the struggles you had in getting, support for it. |
| Alex Jones | Yeah. Happy to the, there's been a lot of ups and downs and hollow history. It's funny, the, it's like the one lesson God just teaches us over and over and over again. And I just learned it again, like, two nights ago was, it's just we'd, like, try and try and try and try and try and try to grasp something so tight and try to fix it. Or if it's broken, we're just like. And then we just give up. And then he fixes it and it's like we try as as hard as we possibly can, and then we just are like, all right, I can't do this. And then he he does it for us. And he was just like, yeah, that's what I was waiting for. Which is just been this beautiful for me, learning, process of surrender. And I wish you could just do it once, and then it's like you got it, but it's just like a thousand times. But, Yeah. So, I mean, it certainly wasn't my idea. It was the good Lord banging me over the head with it until I did something about it. But, I was raised Catholic, but fell away from my faith. When I call myself agnostic or atheist in college and and high school and out of college, I started getting really into meditation, and this is going to be the short version of it. So, but I started getting really into secular meditation, and I was about to go to India for a couple weeks trying to learn how to meditate, because that's where my mind first went. But there were, some secular meditation apps that had launched, that, like, walked you through this process of secular meditation, which is mostly focusing on your breath and using that to kind of recollect yourself. And I started meditating. I love these apps. I thought they were great. Like it was it was almost like technology without technology, like you could press play, but you weren't looking at a screen. It was like you were on a retreat with somebody. And it was like the world's experts in whatever this is teaching you how to do this thing. And it felt personalized. It felt like home. But every time I would meditate, which I realized it was really only the first time that I actually sat in silence. And every time I would sit in silence, my mind kept feeling this weird pull towards something Christian, the name Jesus, the words Holy Spirit, an image of the cross. And so I asked priests or folks I knew. I went to no name. So I had some folks from Notre Dame or, what I thought was really interesting question. Hey, is there any way there's some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing, in this faith thing as Jesus thing? And they all laughed at me just like Mary, and actually just did that and, said, yeah, it's called prayer. We've been doing it for 2000 years. You probably have heard about it. And I was like, no prayers that like asking God for stuff, or maybe even the things that I memorized as a kid. But, I had this one pastor say, yeah, those are great ways to talk to God, which is a really important part of prayer. But have you ever tried to listen to them? And I was like, what does that even mean? And I started learning about this whole world of contemplative and meditative prayer that I'd never heard of before. And, I mean, there's the dozens and dozens, Carmelite spirituality, recollection, imaginative prayer, examine all of Ignatian spirituality, like sort of, you know, all of the beautiful, Benedictine spirituality, the and, I randomly opened up a Bible to Luke 11, Lexi to Mina. Google how to do it. You pick a word that sticks out to you, and hallow was the word that stuck out to me and the Lord's Prayer. In Luke 11, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he gives them the Lord's Prayer. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And hallow is the word that stuck out to me, and it just radically changed my life from me back to my faith. Hallowed means to make holy. So I was like, Lord God, try to make me holy. Am I letting him make me holy? And the answer was, no, I wasn't. And, so I had to change everything. I'd quit a job that I loved and drained my 401 K at 26 years old or whatever. And, did this startup that almost everybody thought was going to be an absolutely terrible idea. Because I liked the structure of the app. And for me, it was like, I wanted this for me, that's I didn't I mean, maybe if 12 people would have used it, I would have thought that was kind of cool. But I like this idea. For me, this idea of like, I liked the structure of the app. I wanted to grow in Christian, contemplative, a meditative prayer and learning what it meant to, like, have a real living relationship with the Lord. And I thought that would be worth. I knew how to code a little bit, so I thought that would be worth trying it. But then folks started using it and, we like had we, we built up a little team and this was yeah, like probably about a year into it. We whatever my 41K was not that big that I drained. And the government takes 30 or 40% of it if you quit before your retirement age. And my credit cards only lasted so long. And we had a you know, my two co-founders are incredible and a founding team, folks who are all contributing. But, you know, we were very quickly running out of money, so we needed to go fundraise because at this point and this was crazy to us, but like a thousand people were using it or something. And so we went and we tried to fundraise and we tried to raise money from all sorts of different people. We tried to raise money from, people who had like donated, big Catholic things before, family and friends call in uncles and cousins and whatever. We tried to raise money from, investors, people who had invested in like, technology things before or anything, really, anybody that we could talk to. And I probably pitched it was like the course of like two over 2 or 3 weeks. I probably pitched 80 people at at least. And this was pre-COVID. So everything was in person. You're traveling everywhere. And and the thing is, it's it's just me and that meeting and they are just, constantly analyzing you because most I mean, there's no real data, there's no real thing. And so it's just like, if this thing is going to work is mostly the team. And so they're just trying to see, like to do use it. And you know, that going in there like do I, it's like an interview or a job interview. It's just like they're just assessing you and and they're assessing the pitch and the idea. And the pitch for me was just the story of my relationship with the Lord. So it's like the most personal thing you could possibly have. And so the hard part is like, if you're lucky, if you're lucky, three people might say, yes, maybe four, maybe five. I mean, all you need is but but but you if that's if you're lucky. But the nos come really, really quick and the yeses take a couple of weeks. And so I'm just sitting there meeting after meeting your email inbox, whatever it is, is just no, no, no, no thanks for coming. But no, I don't you know, I'm not I've never done this before. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm not qualified to do this. It's not that good of an idea. This is 2018. So religion was dying back then. And this was a terrible I mean, especially Catholicism. Nobody had done anything in the Catholic world ever. And so yeah, everybody just thought it was an awful idea. And so you just watch this list of like, 80 possible people that you might even somehow know just dwindle to 50 to 30 to 10 to 5, and it's like, I don't know. I mean, we had people on the team. And so and it was this like dream, but it was just this crazy. Wait. So it's like I'm constantly analyzing myself, like, am I answering questions quick enough for them that I shake their hand well enough? Is that was the answer good enough? Is this a good idea? Is it's a terrible idea that I make a terrible mistake with my whole life and. And then you're just getting no and no and no and no. And so I, I'm like, overwhelmed with the stress. Again. I'm like 27 at this point. I have like like knots in my back. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I'm like going back home at night and like after meetings at like 10 p.m. and starting meetings at like 6:00 am and, and just constant rejection. And so I remember I just, I just, I didn't know what to do. So I just went back in the middle of the night just to my little studio apartment thing, and was, I was like, okay, this is, you know, might as well try praying. And so I prayed and I was like, look out. I don't know what you were thinking here. You clearly chose the wrong person. I'm not the right guy to do this. This obviously, all these people think this isn't going to work and that I'm not the right person for it. And, and, like, for me, I can't honestly, I can't handle this weight. I don't know what it was, but it was just the weight of it. It was just the like immense stress and weight of this whole thing. It felt like it was all riding on my shoulders like this, this thing. And like, if it didn't, if we got all know it, then it just never would have existed. We would have had to go back and get regular jobs, like we would have had to quit, and that would have been it. Because whatever, we have families. And I was like, look, I don't know what. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know how I'm supposed to do it, but I'm going to make you a promise. We make you a deal. I promise you, it's the only thing I know how to do. I promise you, if this thing works, you're going to get the credit. I'm never going to trick myself into thinking that I'm some sort of successful entrepreneur or some sort of evangelist or whatever. Like, I know I'm not doing this. You've made it very clear I'm not the one doing anything good. You're the one doing anything good. I'm never going to trick myself into thinking that it's me. It's always going to be you. You're always going to get the credit. At the same time, if this thing doesn't work out, that's on you. It's not on me. I can't I can't take the weight of that. It's. And that's fine. Like you wanted to teach me a lesson in humility. You wanted to inspire somebody else to do something. It's your thing. Whatever you want to happen with it is going to happen. But it's not mine. It's yours. And if it doesn't work out, I'm going to work really hard. But if it doesn't work out, that's on you. And it was just immediately this weight just lifted from my shoulders. It was just like this freedom. And the next morning that was the middle of the night. The next morning we go to meet with our favorite potential supporter. And, he was one of the like five still on the list. I'm in line at the coffee shop. I open up the daily gospel and read the daily gospel. And it is Peter trying to fish. He's been fishing and there's no fish in the sea. He can't catch anything. And Jesus says, let down your net. And he goes, what are you talking about? There's no fish. You. I've been fishing. You know, for me, it's like I'd been pitching all these investors and no investors here. And then he dives in and he catches more fish than the net can carry. And two minutes later, that guy gives us an offer to fund the whole thing. And then we get 2 or 3 more over the course of the weekend, which was more than we could take. And so it was just this, like, I don't know, this beautiful example of Jesus proving to us, you know, that we are nothing and he's doing everything, which it just does time and time again. |
| Ashley/Mary | And that he was like us. Yeah. And that he wanted it to happen. I mean, more importantly, you look, you know, back at the history of the church and when there's a real need in the church, God always provides someone or something that meets that need. And I'm thinking about, you know, back to the time that you mentioned in 2018, when so many young people were leaving the church, there was no interest. And young men your age in particular were really drifting from the faith and but yet at the same time hungry for it. And, you know, I'm thinking of an article I read by by John K Bodine, who's the former head of the theology department at Notre Dame, where he talks about having a class of incoming freshmen. And he would always give them this quiz at the beginning of the class just to kind of get their baseline of what they knew about Catholicism, because everybody's coming from different high schools and all that stuff. And he was shocked to find that only 50% of his students write Notre Dame, the best and the brightest, as you well know, could name the four Gospels. I know half the class did not know Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They're putting down, you know, Ringo, Paul, John and Paul, you know, that kind of thing. Whoever the Beatles are. But they could not name the four gospels. And so I think what what your work, what hello has met is this not only this, this need to meet, the New evangelization with an app, but also, for for young people in particular, who just were not given the same kind of Catholic education that, you know, I would have had. I mean, I'm 60, and even I went to school in the 70s, and even I know the four Gospels, right, because we had really bad, groovy guitar songs about them and stuff like that. So, but it was a lot of felt applique banners that said, you know, let go, let God. But still we kind of knew the basics. Now you get kids who can't say the Hail Mary, and they're ashamed of it because they they know they should know when they don't. So your app, I think, with the beauty of it, it first of all, it's so high quality, but then it's providing a private way for people to learn so that they're not ashamed to ask the questions that all of your good programing has answered. |
| Alex Jones | Yeah. And I think the really beautiful part and what we saw, like if you go back to 2018, there was this huge surge in like interest in spiritual but not religious. |
| Ashley/Mary | Folks or. |
| Alex Jones | Spirituality or mindfulness or whatever it, it mental health stuff. And I think there was this real hunger, especially in this world of technology today with, with kids, but this real hunger for peace and like a deeper meaning and real purpose and and joy, like real joy, not just distraction and not just busyness and not just anger on Twitter or whatever. It's like real. What is that? What is what is God? What does that actually look like? And for. |
| Ashley/Mary | Us. |
| Alex Jones | Yeah, that's the that's the beautiful part is like it's your spiritual life is that people are hungry for this. The running streams, the running water. It's like the peace that the Lord gives you that no one else can give you. And then, yeah, the knowledge comes with it like the, the, the understanding what the four gospels are, because you fall in love. Like, I know a lot about my wife because I love her, not because she's like intellectually interesting, although she is, but like, I just love her. So I want to know everything about her. And it's the same thing with the Lord. It's like, oh, I just, I want to dive so deep into him and into the church and into the sacraments because I love him. And if you start with that, I also think it's just like, it's why people hold on to their faith through difficulties is because you have that the love you have the real relationship with the Lord. |
| Ashley/Mary | Well, you've mentioned peace and joy a couple of times, and that, of course, always calls to mind advent and the Christmas season. You've got some really special things. And Halo for advent. Tell us a little bit about that. |
| Alex Jones | We are I think this is the coolest thing we've ever done is crazy, because I say that every time. But it's, it's I mean, I, I helped I was very intimately involved in writing this, although there's a much better writer that wrote it. And, but I knew the script by heart. And then I listened to the first session today, and I'm just bawling everywhere. I listen to it yesterday, and I was just bawling. And then we edited it again, and I'm just bawling again. And it's it's just, Sister Miriam, James Hyland is so good at just opening up your heart for Jonathan. Rumi is so good. Chris Pratt does this great job. But the Gwen Stefani there's mother, Natalia there's father, there's there's all the father, John Burns, there's so many great folks in it. But the theme is be still, which like for advent, I don't know. We all we all see this season coming and we all know what's going to happen. It's like, okay, you're going to go visit a bunch of family. You're going to go have to get a bunch of gifts. You're going to have terrible travel, you're going to have a bunch of arguments with everybody. You're going to have a bunch of cooking that doesn't go well. You're going to have a bunch of work that you have to finish by the end of the year. Like it's just stress and busyness. But we know that we're supposed to be these people of peace and stillness. And it's this beautiful Psalm 46 is this beautiful psalm where even then the mountains quake in that the earth falls into the depths of the sea. Like, be still and know that I am God. And it's just this peace that God gives you. And so we're journeying through, trying to find that stillness, trying to find that peace which you only find in the Lord Jesus. And following Mary's example of letting God, bring about Jesus in your life, like very physically, how he did with Mary, but also spiritually into our hearts in the coming of the Lord into our hearts. And so it's this beautiful, both practical and spiritual. And really, really deep. We go through, Carol House Landers, The Read of God, which is this, this beautiful book. It just is radically like just one. |
| Ashley/Mary | Of my favorites. I've written a lot about her. |
| Alex Jones | Yeah, yeah, it's so good. And and it's. But just about how you find how you find the Lord in your heart and how you find true stillness and true peace following Mary's example. And I think it's going to be it's going to be really cool. It's going to be really beautiful. It's it's, I think going to open up a lot of hearts. It's already opened up mine and our, our test of whether it's a good challenge or not is whether whether we get Jonathan to cry while he's recording the script. And, we we got him. We got a couple, we got a couple, couple tears. So I got a couple instances of heavy tears. So it was, was a beautiful challenge. We're excited for it. |
| Ashley/Mary | You mentioned, you know, that before you had a conversion of heart, you were interested in, secular meditation. And that's certainly a big thing culturally. And we just have a few more minutes. But, you know, what would your what would your message be? Or how would you say what hello has to offer for those who are not Christian, but who are still seeking for for quiet, for peace, because there's clearly, an interest beyond Christians in your app. |
| Alex Jones | Yeah. I mean, the difference for us between like, secular meditation and, and Christian meditation, people would think like, oh, well, is it like you meditate on a different word or you pick a different thing and it's like, no, it's the whole it's Jesus. Jesus is the difference. The whole thing, all of us, all of Halo is just falling in love with Jesus. And the thing that I would say we have a ton. We have an enormous blessing of having a ton of non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters on the app. And a ton of, a ton of non-Christian folks on the app who are just exploring Muslim brothers and sisters, Jewish brothers and sisters, a ton of folks just coming. And I think what I would say to them is like, what you're hungry for is true, true peace. What you're hungry for is like meaning and purpose and love and to be the person that you know that you can be, that God is calling you to be like you can you can be this what we would call a saint as a Catholic. And you can be this person of radical love and radical peace and joy and like a joy that doesn't depend on whether you get a good email in a day or not, a joy that like, even if everything goes wrong, you still have joy. If anything, you have more. And but mostly, I think especially this advent season, is this like deep, everlasting, unshakable peace. And that's what I think people are really, truly hungry for. And the only place you can find that is in the Lord. And for Christian, or folks who aren't Christian, my test would be like and I talked to a bunch of folks and it's just like, just give it a try. Like, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe he's real and maybe he changes your life and maybe, you know, you try it and you don't like it. That's fine. But just give it a try. It doesn't have to be on Halo. It can be in anything. But just it could be opening up your Bible. It can be anything but just give it a try. If it changes your life, then, you know, I think I think it will. I think he's real and I think he wants your heart. So it'd be a good use of, you know, 30 days. |
| Ashley/Mary | Well, I can't think of a better time for people who have not, encountered, the serenity and the beauty that your app Halo has to offer than advent. Because you're so right. It's such a manic time, and it it's not meant to be that way. And what a great way to sort of resist the cultural tides. The pull us, unfortunately, away from the true meaning of the season. Then to rediscover time with our Lord in prayer. And as Mary pointed out, the gift of, what your app has to offer is that it can be taken anywhere with you. You can listen to it in the car with your kids, in the carpool line while you're doing dishes. But, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show today and were telling us more about your story. And for all of your time today. |
| Alex Jones | Ashley. Mary, thank you so much. What a blessing. |
| Ashley/Mary | Happy Thanksgiving. Alex. |
| Alex Jones | Likewise. God bless. |
| Betsy | Welcome back to conversations with consequences, where I am joined by our esteemed TCA chaplain, Monsignor Roger Landry. And we're going to talk about getting ready for advent, which begins this Sunday month. Senior, what can we do to get our hearts and minds and our homes ready for advent? |
| Msgr Landry | The first thing is to pay attention to what advent really means, right? Advent is the Latin word for coming, and we mark Christ's three comings. But the first of the most important of the comings in advent. As we get ready for his second coming, a lot of the times people focus on his first coming in Bethlehem, and that's important. And it's fun. And how awesome it is that God loved us so much that he took an amenity into the world. But the real purpose of advent we start with the end in mind, in the end, is when Jesus is going to be coming at the end of the world or our life, whichever comes first, and we need to be ready to run out and embrace him. We go back to the first advent to enter into the history of the Jews, as they were waiting for the Messiah's first coming. We've got a lot to learn from the prophets that God had sent to prepare his people. Likewise, that's why we get John the Baptist in the middle of advent, who helps us to make straight the paths for Jesus to come, so that as he's coming, we can run out to meet him and then the like. The third thing is the way we meet him in the present, the way we meet him in prayer, the way we hear him, and Sacred Scripture, and particularly the way that we meet him in the sacraments, especially the sacrament of the Eucharist. And so we say that we try to meet the Lord in history, mystery and majesty, history 2000 years ago in Bethlehem, mystery in the sacraments and in prayer and majesty. When he comes on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead. But as we run out to meet him who is literally advent coming to us once we encounter him, advent doesn't stop there. We're supposed to be transformed so that we continue the journey with Jesus. We begin to walk with him on that straight path, on that filled in valley, on that leveled mountain, all the way to the celestial Jerusalem. And so advent is all about Jesus. It's about starting with the end in mind. It's about stoking our desire for him. Loved us so much that he entered into our world, remains in our world, and will be coming again, hopefully to find us ready so that he can take us to where he's gone to prepare a place for us. And so that's why advent is so important, with which we start every new liturgical year with that eternal destiny in mind. |
| Betsy | So advent is a penitential season. How does that different from the way we think about lent as a penitential season? |
| Msgr Landry | Well, a lot of people say that advent is a penitential season, but it's a different type of penance. So it's a penance of longing. It's a little bit dependance of purgatory, you could say, lived here in this life in purgatory, it's not so much pains that you're experiencing as the hunger that you have to come into full communion with. God needs to be purified, because we're still divided by some other earthly attachments. And you name it. Advent is a time where the penance is all about yearning for something that's coming. It's the patience that we don't have now. Everything that we desire to have. And so we live that type of suffering we can think about, you know, young couples that are longing to have babies and they really want to have children, and they're trying so hard to have children, but a child doesn't come yet. Or even if they conceive after so many years, those nine months can take a really long time. And, you know, that's the waiting of the advent season, and there is a little bit of pain and suffering there, let's be honest. But it's not the same thing. Like we're fasting. It's not the same thing with that. We're necessarily making acts of charity. Christmas is a great season of generosity, and we should always 365 days a year, be charitable. But it's not so much the focus on the praying, the fasting and the almsgiving that we have at the beginning of the Lenten season. What we're all geared to is the suffering that's associated with not having now what we really want the most, and that's eternal communion with God. That's heaven with God. That's to be a saint with all the communion of saints in heaven. And so we're not there yet, Betsy. You're you're you're on the way, I think, on that road to holiness more than I am. But, but that's the penance of advent. We need to look at it a little bit differently. Even though the priests are still wearing the same purple vestments. There was a different spirit, actually, the spirit for advent that we mentioned in the prefaces throughout the season is the joyful season of advent that we are happily preparing for the fulfillment of our hope when Christ comes in that three fold way. |
| Betsy | So give us one maybe new tip for spiritually preparing for advent that people might not have in their daily or weekly. Schedules of things to do that might bring us a little bit more Christmas joy. |
| Msgr Landry | I think that the most important thing we can be doing in advent is thinking about heaven. That like, we begin to just think, why does heaven exist? Why does God want us to be in heaven? Focus really on what's coming and so when we say the words thy kingdom come and the Our Father, for example, how much do we mean it? Do we really want his kingdom come? We celebrated Christ the King last Sunday. What does that king to mean? It means that God is with us is the ultimate reality in our whole life. So stoking that desire for his kingdom, I think, is the first and the foremost way we do it. And it's supposed to grow. And that's one of the reasons why, with the advent wreath, the most important part of the advent wreath is not the wreath, which shows God's eternal love. It's not the color of the candles three purple in one rose. It's ultimately the flame. And over the advent season we have one flame. And then two, three and four to symbolize how our desire is supposed to be growing, symbolized by that flame. So that's what I'd say. Bets. |
| Betsy | Well, I have my advent candles ready, and I hope all of our listeners do too. And thank you so much, Monsignor, for helping us get ready for advent. |
| Msgr Landry | Happy advent. |
| Ashley | Welcome to conversations with consequences. Now on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Ashley Dwyer, and we are thrilled to have back with us the one and only Megan Cox Gurdon. Megan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where she reviews children's books, and she is also the author of The Enchanted Hour The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. Megan, welcome to the show. |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Thanks, Ashley. It's great to be with you. |
| Ashley | So, Megan, you wrote your book in 2019. This was pre-COVID, which seems like eons ago, and the phrase the age of distraction has only taken off. So you were really a prophetess because now everybody's talking about it. What is the age of distraction, and how has that reality changed since you wrote the book six years ago? |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | I well, I think everything I described in the book has only been intensified, you know, as you pointed to the pandemic as a cause for that. Of course, people were already struggling with the enthralling effects of technology on their minds. The way it distracts you, oh, obviously draws you to itself, draws you away from the people you're with. So you know that we've all seen that maybe we've ourselves committed this crime of that spectacle of a parent, like looking at a phone and the children are around, and it's as though the parent has been teleported out of the situation. Well, that's amazing distraction. And I think we've all got sort of I mean, I struggle this to sort of internet brain like our brains now know that we aren't just in our own reality. We're also we have there's this alternative digital reality that's taking place all at the same time. So you may be you may have actually put your phone down, but you may remain more distracted, less in the moment, less available, less present to the people around you, and even to your own life. Because you know that the internet is it's going on out there, there. You know, there are conversations taking place, there are purchases you could be making. There are to do lists. You could be, you know, all of that. So yes, I think in the book I describe the ways that, I mean, my book is really about reading aloud and how it can it can mitigate some of these effects that we find from technology. So partly being distracted from the people were with partly not being attentive to our, you know, the our life as it goes by day to day being on our phones rather than reading books and therefore not engaging in deep reading of the kind that really, you know, enlists the imagination and the vocabulary and, past, present and future and all of that has become reading aloud really helps, with all of these, all of these kind of symptoms and conditions of tech addiction, which is, I think, what we're experiencing as a culture is, is it is a kind of mass addiction. |
| Ashley | Let's talk a little bit more about reading aloud, because this is something, your son went to the school at. My son's are now at a school called the Heights School for Boys in Potomac, Maryland, and an elementary school which starts in third. They're very big on reading aloud, and I thought that was interesting. It wasn't something I did in school. The teachers, the children all read the books together. They read them out loud in the classroom. Often it's the teacher reading to the children. Sometimes they pass the book around. And it's really kind of a wonderful, magical thing. But tell me a little bit more about what exactly is distinct about reading out loud versus just reading to yourself in a quiet corner? |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Yeah, well, you know, reading out loud in a classroom is one of the most kind of radically embracing things. A teacher can do because it is natural, you know, reading itself, decoding signs on a page is a very unnatural process. It takes us many years to learn to read, to decode the shapes and string them into sentences and paragraphs and whatever, and full thoughts and characters and things. And that's kind of arduous. And, you know, not everybody is a great reader. You know, some of us are rich. It's effortless. And some of us we really struggle. But reading aloud is a different thing because language comes to us naturally through our ears. Like that's how we pick it up when we're little. So when you read to somebody, you're taking the words off the page and you're delivering it to them in a in a form that is very easy for them to understand. So one of the beautiful things that happens in a classroom is that the a students who are really good at reading anyway, you know, they could read for themselves. They don't really need someone to read aloud to them, but the but they are getting the story at the same time and at the same level as the C and D students who might struggle to read. I really enjoy it. So it's there's a wonderful kind of leveling effect. It's more like an uplifting effect that everyone gets to participate and their brains. This is a cool thing when someone is reading aloud and everyone is, and there's a group of people listening to a story and it might be a classroom or a family, their brain patterns are actually synchronizing. So yeah, there's a lovely warm thing or something paraphrasing what you said and that that that is a real thing that's happening. There's a real physiological synchronizing that's happening when people are listening to a story out loud. That is it is unlike anything else that we do in the world. It's it's a feeling of, connectedness, of imagination being set free. And, you know, again, in the classroom, reading aloud really liberate the struggling reader to see, well, this is what books are about, and it really is what books are about. It's about the beauty of language. It's the beauty of storytelling, and it's accessible. If someone does the reading aloud for you. Exactly. It's a different way of experiencing literature. But it's it's wonderful. And actually, there's one more thing about reading aloud in the classroom, in the family that's kind of important in this sense, and that is that we, all of us have a vocabulary, an expressive vocabulary. The words that we use and say that is a great deal smaller than our receptive vocabulary. So we know more words from context, from reading. We might not even have really understood what the word meant the first time we saw it, but we pick up the meaning over time. So, so we understand more words than we say. And that's true of you and me. That's certainly true of children. But children, you know, really, up until high school, have a much bigger receptive vocabulary than an expressive vocabulary. So they can take in language through the ear that is much more sophisticated than they will ever use, or at least while they're children, or be able to even read for themselves. So it's a it's another way of kind of it's an unlocking that happens when you read literature to children. You make it accessible to them, you expand their vocabulary, you kind of connect them in the moment physiologically and emotionally. And I would argue culturally to chew through the choice of what you read them. You can connect them to particular authors to the past, whatever. So yeah, so you're right that you see something special happening in the classroom because there is something special happening in the classroom. |
| Ashley | Well, and that really resonates what you just said, because, one of my sons was a natural reader. He started reading it for it was like a flip switch. My other son, it turns out, is dyslexic, and he's in third grade and he's just basically now learning to read. And you're just it's so true. And what's interesting is that because he's dyslexic, my husband has been reading out loud to him much longer than any of our other kids, who at a certain point could read by themselves. |
| Ashley | And even though my son can now basically read, he still wants his dad to read to him. So there's like something special there. You mentioned uplifting and I, I want to ask about just kind of the content of children's books because the other day I, I saw this quote, by C.S. Lewis. He said, since it is so likely the children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. |
| Ashley | And that struck me, because what really made my older son start to love to read was the Narnia series, and I thought that might be a little hard for him. And my sense is that people think children will want to be more inclined to read if it's easy, and it's kind of like funny and brought down to their level, but it seems like it's the opposite, that it's it's these lofty books that really are what draw in children. |
| Ashley | Do you think that's true? And and what are some of, the kind of great entry books for burgeoning readers. |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Okay. That's a that second question is a big one. Yeah. Yes. I do think it's true. Here's a funny story. What I when I started writing about actually the very first children's book I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal was a children's book by Madonna of all people, called The English Roses and Madonna. This would have been 20 something years ago. Madonna had just become a mother, and she was startled by what she felt was the kind of the lack of struggle in children's in contemporary children's books. Everything was kind of easy. Everyone got along. Everyone learns the lesson about, you know, don't exclude the outsider. And we're all, you know, even different people can fit in and all, you know, there there's this, you know, everything is safe and everyone is fine. And it's like this really, it's really kind of very minimal. And so she thought, well, I'm Madonna, I'm going to write a children's book. And she wrote this. She's pretty good. I think it was really a kind of Cinderella story. And it was it was a lot of fun. But anyway, I thought that was I thought that was funny, that even Madonna, who was this kind of, you know, cultural whatever stretcher of norms, wanted there to be some, some meat to children's books. Yeah, I would say. I mean, there's this difficulty in children's books that that they are written and sold, written by and sold to adults, you know, so we have everything you see in the culture, all these sort of dominant fashions that we see in the culture. You see them in children's books, and, and, and there is, there has been an it kind of an extraordinary. Well, if we can call it a dumbing down of, of complexity, of struggle, during the Cultural Revolution, our recent cultural revolution, of course, there was the whole problem of if you depict anything that is retrograde or unpleasant, then you might be accused of perpetuating that thing when in fact, as C.S. Lewis said, you have to have a dragon so that someone can defeat the dragon. So you have to you have to present evil used to present struggle, conflict no good. There's no good story without conflict. Because there has to be a kind of have to be. You want there to be a triumph over the conflict? Yeah. So I so I think we have a little bit of a everything we're seeing in the culture is regrettably reflected in children's books. There's been some discussion lately about how Gen Z children or young people are really cut off from the past, and they don't know much about the past. And, and to some degree, I think that's true. And it's also, it's not entirely their fault because there has been this very strong desire to, as you said, meet children where they are rather than to pull them out of where they are and show them the extraordinary horizons that surround them. It was an example of this. You remember the illustrator, Richard Scarry? |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Yeah. So he, he, he made a fortune in the middle of last century with his, what was his book called. His busy book, I think it was, but the Richard Scarry books have been reissued since they were first published in let's call it the 60s. I don't know exactly, but I think that's about right. And they've been reissued and and with each successive reissue, they have been cleaned up and simplified. So one of the things that children, we're getting away from fairy tales here and, and complex stories of struggle, but, but but in terms of of the of how complicated things are that you can present complicated things to children and they will reach toward them. Or you can think, oh, that's going to be too scary, too complicated for you. Let's clean it up for you. So the Richard Scarry illustrations, which were so fascinating for so many generations of children because of their intricate detail, funny little quirky, jokey kind of things, personalities, they've been cleaned up and there are they're there are fewer kind of, fewer distinctive vocabulary words in those books as they've been republished. Certainly things like sex stereotypes have been all been fixed. So you know, there's no more a stewardess, you can't have a stewardess, you can have a, What? I forgot what she was called. I'm not even sure it's a she anymore. They've changed the sex of things and put aprons on the dads and all of that kind of thing, you know, to sort of make sure that you're not kind of giving children the wrong idea. So. Yeah. Forgive me. I'm. I'm kind of going, this is this is a topic that goes in every direction. So you asked about, great entry books for children. You know, I always think my father's dragon is a good one. That that is a that's a it's a simple chapter book, but I want to go back to something else. You said, actually, you described, your own children, you know, learning to read and therefore not reading to them anymore. And I would strongly urge you, if you can, if you can grab them back, keep reading to them for as long as you can. My own parents read to me until I could read. I was a precocious reader. And they read to me until I could read to myself. And then they didn't read to me anymore. And, you know, I really understand a lot of that makes sense that they would have done that. It would make sense that you would do that, too. You think, okay, well, the child can get literature. The child doesn't need me to interpret literature. But actually you're doing so many more things when you read aloud with a child. And you are one of the things you can do is you can then, open the door to complicated chapter books that your child would not want to tackle, maybe alone, you know, depending on the age. One of the things I did with my children, I had five of them, and we read every night for an hour, hence the title of my book. It was An Enchanted Hour. Sometimes it was a blighted hour. You know, it's not always easy. But I would read to them some picture books that they wanted that were, you know, meeting them on their level. And then I always read to them a chapter book as well. And it was interesting to. |
| Ashley | See. |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | How some of the books, for instance, the Narnia series, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books, even Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island and kidnaped, which is just full of, of accents, kind of hard on the mouth after a while. But I would read those. I read a chapter of those each night, and the older children would kind of get it. The little ones wouldn't really get it, but then we would go through it again maybe a year or two later, and then you could see everybody was like getting it a little bit more. So they were sort of almost growing up into the literature. And this is something that I think you can do when you keep reading aloud to your children, even after they can read to themselves, because they're going to get something different, you know, each each way. |
| Ashley | Well, you know, the Richard scary thing, it reminds me of when my daughter was becoming a big reader and I, during Covid, we discovered, a box of old Nancy Drew's, which she plowed right through. I went to the library and found they've all been, like, reissued, but dumbed down. And to find an original Nancy Drew was very challenging. And that's what I grew up reading. Yeah, well, we're, only have a few more minutes, but I want to get to a topic that I think everybody's very excited about, which is, Christmas coming around the corner, the beginning of advent. And, there's just there's so many wonderful Christmas and Advent books. And I know that you are a expert on them. So what are some of your, favorites or recommended for our listeners who are looking to sort of elevate their literature, advent experience in their family? |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Well, there's one book in particular that I absolutely love. It's called Nativity. And it is, really have to look at the name here if I can pronounce her correctly. Geraldine Elsner, it's you can still get it. Came out a few years ago, but the main thing about it is that the illustrations are all by Jojo. So it's 13th century gorgeous. You know, early. I mean, he was he he prefigured the Renaissance by, like, what, 100 years or something? I mean, these exquisite pictures. And so you so I love reading that with my children and now my grandchildren because, they are hearing the story of the Nativity, but they're seeing just, just unspeakable beauty. And there's and just so funny. I mean, Jonah was a great observer of the faith. There's one little, little kind of picture in the book that we everyone loves. We always look at it every year, and it's a little picture of the baby Jesus. He's swaddled, he has his halo and and someone is wiping his nose. You know that face that babies make when you wipe? They're like, well, baby Jesus is. He's like, oh, stop doing that to me. It's so lovely. It's so it's both it's human. It's divine. It's just a wonderful book. So I highly recommend that. And then for, for fun of illustration, you know, then that's really there's, there's the Nutcracker ballet, there's an addition that was done some years ago. The publisher was Scholastic, interestingly, back in the day. It's by a by a writer illustrator called Vladimir, Viscount AGI. And again, this is something you can get, although it's not, you know, in bookstores now, but, the illustrations are really very vivid of the, of the, of the scenes in The Nutcracker ballet. And it was one of those books in which, there's one scene and it's the dance of the flowers. I think, you know, and, and so there are all these lovely little flowers dancing around, and my daughters in particular would compete to say, no, I'm in that flower. No, I'm that flower. I'm that, you know, that that way that children interact with the pictures. So I think that's a great one. And, obviously the Charles Dickens Christmas Carol is a wonderful read aloud because it's very deep, very moving, but it's also full of wonderful vocabulary, and you can do it over the course of a few evenings. But I have a couple of new books I can tell you about that just come out this year or just coming out. I haven't even written about these yet. Then I really love how Six Found Christmas. And the publisher is holiday House and the author is Trina Hyman, and it's about it's about a little girl who doesn't know what a Christmas is. And she goes to find it and she enlists a bunch of animals and they all, you know, so there are six of them total, and they hunt around in the woods, and then eventually they find a beautiful empty. They know that Christmas is something beautiful. They know that it smells good. But they don't really know what a Christmas is. And they find an an old, beautiful bottle and she brings it home and uses it to make, a pretty flower arrangement, uses it as a vase. And the last line is very I mean, this is again, this is not an advent oriented thing. This is more secular. But Christmas is not only where you find it, it's what you make of it. Not wrong, I suppose. For many families. So I thought that was really nice. There's also there's, Jan Brett, who's very, beloved for her very intricate pictures. She has this new one. It's called the Christmas sweater. So it's not it's obviously not a nativity story, but it's a story about, you know, Christmas sweaters, as if famously horrific to look at and embarrassing where and in this case, a grandmother who's called a Yaya here, makes a Christmas sweater for a dog. The dog is mortified, does not want to wear the Christmas sweater, and the child takes the dog is essentially, I'm going to give the whole story way, so that the child takes the dog out in the Christmas sweater into the snow. And the sweater begins to unravel all through the woods. And then at the very end, the child thinks, I don't know how we're going to get home. But miraculously, of course, they can follow the thread of the Christmas sweater so the dog gets his way. He doesn't have to wear this stupid thing, and the boy gets home safely and the Christmas sweater saves the day. And that's Jen, Brett. And that that publisher is, quickly. I can't see. Oh, it's Penguin Penguin young readers. Yeah. So so those are a couple of, of this year's books that I think are kind of, you know, they're nice. They're nice additions. In our family, we, we have a collection of Christmas books, and they come out every year. So they're the old favorites. And then every year we try to add 1 or 2 more. And I recommend that as a, as an annual, you know, treat. And may I just quickly add, there is no better time if you don't have the family practice of reading aloud. There's no better time than Christmas and Advent for that, I think because it is a special time of year and it's a wonderful excuse, as it were, to start like after dinner under the Christmas tree, whatever the setting is, if you have a fireplace, great. Is it like, come, come sit with me and let's read a story together and then the whole family can do it. And if and if you just start five minutes a day, you know, just do it at the same time. The next day after dinner. Whatever it's reading aloud can seem like a guide. It's kind of like a thing, like, oh, I'm really into that thing. But once it gets going, it's so nice, it's so warm, and you get all those benefits that we were talking about. That that it it's it's a very easy habit to acquire. And I recommend it at Christmas. I think it's a, it's a great way to it's a great time to start. |
| Ashley | Well you've certainly inspired me. Really. I'm, I'm going to go call my husband and say, we're starting this right away. And, so thank you so much, Megan, for all your wonderful, insights on this wonderful tradition of reading aloud and something that, as you point out, is accessible to anyone and you can start it at any time. I encourage our listeners to, buy her book, The Enchanted Hour and, to follow her column with The Wall Street Journal. And Megan, thank you so much for your time. |
| Meghan Cox Gurdon | Thank you. Ashley, I really enjoyed talking with you. |
| Ashley | You know, back, this would have been about 15 years ago. There was an excellent article in First Things by a woman who did, a regular national like Etiquette and Manners column, Judith Martin. She was Miss Manners. If anybody remembers that column, I think it was nationally syndicated for a long time, and it got me to thinking about a story I heard, because I have been talking to different people I know now in my age range, who are hiring younger people from a different generation for positions, and has remarks to me on what he believes is a is a bit of, a deficit and understanding sort of modern workplace manners and etiquette. And this person is not a snob. This is not like a, you know, British royal family thing versus the rest of the world. But it reminded me of a story. My husband is a i.t engineer, so was very much in that world. And about a man who was a finalist. So in like the top three for some big job. It was it was with one of the Japanese tech firms. So it wasn't like Apple or whatever where, you know, guys show up in their whatever track pants. But he so his final interview round after going through many rounds was at a very expensive restaurant in London, and they all sat down to eat. And he there was seafood served as a first course, and he picked up the wrong fork. And that ended the interview process, and they kept going with the meal. But after that he did not get called back. And when he asked for feedback, they said, listen, your job is very front facing. We have to send you out in front of the tech bros in Silicon Valley, but also people who might be members of Parliament here in London. The Japanese are very manners, aware, and manners emphasizing. And they said, if you in certain circles, if you're out there representing us and you're not using the right fork, unfortunately that's that will immediately lower your standing in some cultures and therefore lower the company standards. And so that kind of got me to thinking about these kind of basic things now, like we had to when I was a girl, we had to believe it or not, Sears department store offered an etiquette and manners class when you were 12 and 13 that you had to go to where they showed you. This is what a formal dinner looks like. And always remember you're driving a BMW, right? Bread meal, water. That's how you remember it. This is where your napkin goes. You always put your napkin in your lap first. So it sort of got me to thinking after reading this Miss Manners article where she argues it is actually like practicing a form of charity if you are using proper manners and etiquette, because everybody knows what the rulebook is, and it's a way for everyone to feel comfortable around each other. So it's not meant to be like the we and them. Kind of like you didn't use the right fork, you fool, but it's more like, here's the rules that everybody abides by. Therefore everybody is welcome. It doesn't matter if you're poor. It doesn't matter if you're rich. You know, here are kind of the standards that we hold people to. And so it seems to me that manners and etiquette and that sort of stuff are becoming less and less important in society. Like my my two older girls, I made them go to classes when they were younger and their Catholic school offered it. And I also know of a seminary rector who required all his first years to go to a manners and etiquette class, specifically around meals, because he said they don't all come from the same background. If they get invited to wherever, whatever it is a black tie dinner for a pregnancy center or a parishioners home, I don't want it to get back to me ever. That they didn't. They didn't know how to. They didn't have good table manners, he said. I would find that so embarrassing, not just for myself, but for them. So I just thought like, is this is this a dying thing now? Is this something that people should still be focusing on, or do we need like handwriting? Bring back handwriting. Right. And handwriting classes. Is this something. Was there good in those classes that now we're not using and utilizing in a way that could be really, really helpful for other people? I think it's interesting that you call it a form of charity. And I do think there's this manners did in this essay, which I can yeah, I can post. Well, it's funny because I recently was at a formal ish function and I was about to faint. I was so hungry and the bread basket was on the complete other side of the table. It was so loud. And it shocked me that of the ten adults sitting at the table, not one person thought to move the basket around. And I was so kind of like, disturbed by it because it's such basic manners that I came home and I gave my kids a lecture, and again, kind of startled my husband because he's usually the one that's like, kids sit down, get your bottoms in the seat. You know, you put use your fork and knife, don't use your fingers. But I was like, kids, these are some bait. I was like, have I taught my kids these things? And I was like, your left hand stays in your lap. You do not put your elbow on the table. You pass the basket around. But I said that there was something was there. Because when you're passing the basket around or, you know, sometimes there's something communal, whether it's a bottle of wine or whatever, it leads to smaller conversations and creates more of a sense of like, we're eating this meal together. We're not just like isolated individuals in our seats stuffing our faces. It's like we're sharing this. And that's where I had never thought of that component of it being a form of charity. But that's what I'm saying. But I'm 100% with you. It's a struggle in my own home. I'm not going to be somebody who says I'm raising the most well-mannered kids. It's it's it's startling when other kids come over. So 100%. We need a return to manners. |