Libsyn Directory

Clare Morell on the Tech Exit: How Smartphones Undermine Our Parenting—and How to Reverse Course

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

Release Date: 06/12/2025

Kevin Twomey on Frantic Families: Three Questions for a More Intentional Life

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

Kevin Twomey is a husband, father, and a principal consultant at Table Group, founded by Patrick Lencioni, which specializes in helping executive teams build a healthy operational work culture. Lencioni’s book, The Three Big Questions, brings that same expertise to bear on the modern frantic family: helping parents find their family identity, create intentional priorities, and live with more order and purpose. Chapters: 4:01 Typical family operations 9:09 Frantic families in a frantic world 14:36 What makes your family unique? 21:57 Parent leadership 26:02 What is your...

Colin Gleason on the Father as Protector

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

The first images of a “protector” that flash through our minds might be the warrior, the superhero, the movie star physically holding back evil from invading the world…. Our lower school head, Colin Gleason, casts a different vision: the benevolent king, the merciful brother, the knight at vigil in the sanctuary. Yes, our role as fathers is to protect—most often through a steady presence that communicates security to our children. When we do our job well, they can live with confidence. In his talk from the Fatherhood Conference last fall, Colin identified five battlegrounds for...

Tom Cox on an Epic Education: Tolkien in the Middle School

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

To prepare for Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, the Eddas, and Dante—The Heights begins with Tolkien. In a talk from 2016, former middle school core teacher and current upper school classics teacher Tom Cox defends the place of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the epic tradition. He then explains why Middle Earth is so uniquely suited to the middle school, using Samwise the Stouthearted as our guide to the heart of a middle school boy. Chapters: 2:46 Rethinking “the middle” 4:01 How LotR prepares boys for upper school 7:57 How LotR meets boys in middle school 12:47...

Michael Moynihan on the Father as a Guide to the World

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

From utero and into infancy, babies recognize their mother as being essentially one with them. So, being placed in their father’s arms is in fact their first introduction to the “other,” the outside world. The father will continue this crucial role as mediator and representative to the outside world throughout a boy’s childhood. With decades of experience and dozens of personal anecdotes, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan addressed the 2025 Fatherhood Conference to share how a father’s parenting outlook now will shape his son’s vocational and professional readiness to...

Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Reading into Reality: What Is Intellectual Formation?

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

Our mission is to assist parents in the intellectual, moral, physical, and spiritual formation of their sons… At The Heights, we repeat these words often, including a paraphrase at the beginning of every HeightsCast episode. But what constitutes intellectual formation? What does educating the intellect look like? Co-founder of the Hillbilly Thomists and Rector Magnificus at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, joins us for a deep-dive into the rich Catholic understanding of intellectus, habitus, ratio, and what it means to...

Fr. Carter Griffin and Alvaro de Vicente on Vocational Discernment in an Age of Infinite Options

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25). This week we’re joined by Fr. Carter Griffin, rector of the St. John Paul II Seminary in the Archdiocese of Washington, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of The Heights School, to examine “discernment.” It’s become a Catholic buzzword, applied (or sometimes, perhaps, misapplied) to a number of life situations. Here, Fr. Carter and Alvaro discuss the methods and limits of vocational discernment—and the moral courage of commitment. Chapters: 3:45 Christian discernment...

Colin Gleason on Manners: The “ABCs” of Virtue

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

by Robert Greving by Robert Greving Featured Opportunities: , donations for Jamaica hurricane relief at The Heights School (January 7-9, 2026 / May 6-8, 2026)

Dan Lively on Formation for the Body: Lifelong Functional Fitness

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

In our school communities, we talk a great deal about moral and intellectual formation. But physical development, too, has an essential place in the whole-person, long-term vision of what our sons and students can become. Heights Athletic Director Dan Lively reminds us that the goals of athletic training don’t begin and end with high school sports. In fact, lifelong functional fitness is in service to every vocation. It ensures that we and our sons are capable of having a positive impact—on the world and in our families—for as many years as we’re on this earth. Chapters: 3:22 A...

Dr. Jason Baxter on Why Beauty Matters: The Postmodern Pressure on Our Interior Life

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

One philosopher of our time claims that “today, the experience of beauty is impossible.” Dr. Jason Baxter, director of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College, begs to differ. Dr. Baxter joins us on HeightsCast to unpack his latest book, Why Literature Still Matters, which looks at why such a claim might feel true in our digital age. Then, he talks us through why and how we should reclaim our experiences of beauty for the health of our soul. Chapters: 00:03:34 The experience of beauty 00:08:44 Byung-Chul Han: the possibility of beauty today 00:15:41 Marc Auge: still...

Tom Cox on Being a Faculty of Friends: Making Schools into Communities

HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

The joy of “being known here” is not just for the students. When a faculty cultivates friendship, it benefits the entire school community. Tom Cox has been a middle and upper school Latin and Greek teacher at The Heights since 2009. Tom also hosts The Forum Faculty Podcast, now in its second year, which gives a slice of teacher breakroom culture: the kinds of conversations, rapport, and friendship that are born of our shared work and life as teachers. Tom joins us today to talk about how important faculty friendship is to making a school into a community, and what schools can do to support...

The ever-changing tech landscape and the ever-growing research on interactive screens means that the topic must come up anew year after year. For parents trying to keep pace, Clare Morell has compiled the most up-to-date research into her recent release, The Tech Exit. Armed with the facts and interviews with dozens of Tech Exit families, she encourages parents that it’s never too late to reverse course on smartphones. United with other families trying to do the same, we can replace the new “smartphone milestone” with real milestones that emphasize the goods of the real world.

Chapters:

00:03:56 Getting the metaphor right
00:08:32 The myth of time limits, parental controls
00:11:24 Boys and online extortion
00:14:23 A culture inherent to smartphone use
00:17:51 A parent’s willpower vs. Big Tech
00:22:30 The alternatives: feature phones, landlines
00:31:25 Not your mama’s internet
00:34:43 Brain drain: new research on attention, making memories
00:39:41 How to reverse course with teens
00:43:01 The 30-day digital fast
00:47:17 A new digital paradigm: F.E.A.S.T.
00:56:13 Digital accountability in the home
01:00:30 Morell’s personal tech use
01:05:22 The father’s role
01:09:56 Encouragement to start

Links:

The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell

The Tech Exit Supplementary Resources by Clare Morell

Reset Your Child’s Brain by Victoria Dunckley

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

‘Sextortion’ Scams Involving Apple Messages Ended in Tragedy for These Boys, 7 June 2025, WSJ

How Broken Are Apple’s Parental Controls? It Took 3 Years to Fix an X-Rated Loophole, 5 June 2024, WSJ

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity, April 2017, UChicago Press

Also on the Forum:

Dumb Phones, Feature Phones, and the New Tech Landscape featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Technology in the Home: Perspective, Principles, and Practices by Michael Moynihan

Smart Phones: A New Mythos by George Martin

On Self-Mastery, Technology, and Parental Discernment featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Smart Phones: Why Wait When He’s “The Only One” featuring Joe Cardenas

Featured opportunities:

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)