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Is beauty something you consider when planning your family’s educational goals? Today John Hodges, Director of the Center for Western Studies joins us to discuss why beauty should be a foundational aspect of education and how it can be seamlessly woven into academics.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Welcome again. I’m Marlin Detwiler, and you've joined us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education. Today we have with us from Memphis, Tennessee, John Hodges. John, welcome.

John Hodges:

Very glad to see you, Marlin!

Marlin Detweiler:

It is wonderful to connect again. We've known each other for a long time, and we'll get into what first brought us together. But tell us a little bit about yourself personally, your family, and a bit about your career and interests.

John Hodges:

Oh, my goodness. Well, I live here in Memphis with my dear wife– let's see now, for 38 years. And we have a grown son who is married and living in Minneapolis and has a son of his own now. So I'm a granddad. And for the first time and let's see, what else can I tell you? I'm a musician.

I studied orchestral conducting at the university and then in graduate school. And then, I went on to conduct orchestras for many years. So I'm that's my major training. But then I taught colleges as well.

Marlin Detweiler:

Do you play instruments?

John Hodges:

Yeah, I'm a trumpet player. I play several instruments badly. I tell people I play the orchestra now. I play the orchestra! That's my that's story. I got into music when I was very young and I started conducting when I was in high school. So I've been conducting, gee, I don't know, since 1973, I guess in 1970. Something like that.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's great.

John Hodges:

And then I taught college for many years while I was conducting orchestras. And there, I taught music and art history and philosophy of the Christian faith. So I ran an organization called the Institute for the Arts and Cultural Apologetics. My dean liked long-term titles.

Marlin Detweiler:

That leads us to some of the things or one of the things you're up to today, which we'll get into in just a moment. As a conductor, you were also a composer, I read. Tell us a little bit about your interests and being in composition music.

John Hodges:

Well, I was doing–l I was conducting, and I was working in various churches as well. And I began to think, why couldn't I write some arrangements or some compositions for my own choir, you know, that we could use. And I really wanted to encourage other people to do that anyway. So I thought, “Well, why not me?”

So I got into that too. And what it's turned out to be is some composing for. A musical partner and I had written a musical based on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, it's called it's called Golden. And it's in development right now in New York City. So we've had two fine workshops with Broadway actors doing our singing and reading our script and so on. And we were in the process of finding a developmental theater that will run it. We're working with a Tony Award winning production company in New York called the Show Town Theatricals. They just won a Tony this last Tony, you know, deal. And we're working with them and they've found us some very good people to work with. And so we've got a big team now and we've got our investors lined up. So all we have to do is write a good show. That's and that's what we're doing.

Marlin Detweiler:

That process is far more sophisticated and takes far longer than most people realize. I was added to a reading on the show Amazing Grace in New York in a workshop environment and then saw it produced off-Broadway before it finally came on, and it was just fascinating how long and the whole process it took. That's commendable. I'm excited. I hope you'll keep me informed about how that develops.

John Hodges:

Yes, will do! The buzz for the show in New York has been very good. And our producers want to keep that going by having a cabaret concert of just our music sung by Broadway singers in December. So we're nailing down the date right now and the location, but it'll be at some kind of cabaret in New York, and hopefully, we'll have some big names.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's very exciting.

You've also worked in church music, too. Was it one or two churches where you were the minister of music?

John Hodges:

Well, I guess I've worked in one, two...

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, okay.

John Hodges:

Three, I guess three. But the most recent and the most, I guess extensive was at Second Presbyterian in Memphis. I was there for ten years.

Marlin Detweiler:

What did you do?

John Hodges:

We had a big choir there that we could do, you know, big choral, orchestral things. I would hire the Memphis Symphony folks to come in and play, and we'd do the Brown's Requiem or the Haydn creation or, you know, something like that. And so it was a very big program.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's really neat. Yeah, I have enjoyed– I go to a smaller church right now, and I've always enjoyed churches that had live orchestra instruments as part of the music.

John Hodges:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

It really is of significance and impact in the in the worship experience. You got involved in classical education… Oh goodness, this would have been back in probably ‘94? Or ‘93.

John Hodges:

That's right, you've got a good memory.

Marlin Detweiler:

I have a good peg for it. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

John Hodges:

Well, I was just saying, that's about the time you and I met each other. Probably. I think something like ‘94. 19 years right in there. Don't you suppose?

Marlin Detweiler:

I think it's about right. But you were involved as a founding board member of Westminster Academy in Memphis, a classical Christian school, and one of the early schools we met when you all asked me to come up there and speak and consult the board.

John Hodges:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Tell me how you got involved in that. What was it that made you say, “I’ve got to be part of this?”

John Hodges:

Well, I was teaching college at a little private Christian college here in town called Creighton College, and we had designs to give what we thought was the best of a liberal arts education to our students. And so I got a call from Rick Hall. Rick Hall and I were buddies. And he said, How would you like to be involved with getting that same kind of seven liberal arts kind of training into the K-12 world?

And I said, I think that sounds like a great idea. It would make up for, you know, we're starting from scratch basically as freshmen college-level work. People weren't studying that way. So we were trying to do that at the college level. So when he offered that idea, I got involved and six couples got together. And it's interesting because none of the six of us knew all the other five before we started. Everybody was, you know, new to this and represented, I think at least five different churches. So it was a big, multi-faceted organization from the very beginning. I think it was ‘94 when we started thinking about it, and it was ‘96 when we opened. But in between those two, we had you out at least once, maybe twice before.

Marlin Detweiler:

I was there twice. I've often said these folks in Memphis were foolish enough to invite me twice.

John Hodges:

Oh no! Your contribution helped clarify for a lot of people what we were after. And so that helped out a lot.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's good. So you raise an interesting question because I see a lot of collegiate initiatives thinking that that's where the key shaping goes on for young people. But as I've been involved in the K-12 world now for more than 30 years, I see and believe that it's a little bit like what you just said. I want to hear you unpack it more. It's too late.

John Hodges:

Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:
Now I will say better late than never, but tell us what advantage you see for a well-educated, well-classically Christian-educated kid coming into a collegiate setting. How does it make a difference?

John Hodges:

It's oh, it's priceless! What we saw so much was that a lot of young people, as you know, that were going off to college, having grown up in the church and grown up in a Christian school and they go off to college and then lose their faith. And it was a massive number. I mean, I forget what the number was at least 50%.

Marlin Detweiler:

It has been reported that in all of Christian circles, going to colleges is as high as 70%.

John Hodges:

Oh, my, it’s gotten worse.

Marlin Detweiler:

Now, that's not necessarily a permanent loss, in other words.

John Hodges:

Right. Right.

Marlin Detweiler:

They may come back, but that's what he observed and I think has some data to back it up. That's been the case in an undergraduate time period in college.

John Hodges:

Yeah, I think that's right. The problem is that somehow we weren't teaching our kids that academic work and the Christian faith were integrated, so that they understand that you don't have to park your brain at the door to become a Christian or get rid of your Christianity in order to be a serious academic. Neither of those is necessary. And we've also, together as a culture, forgotten that the university was born out of a Christian mind.

Marlin Detweiler:

So I make the statement stronger now. But you'll agree with me that you can't park your brain. It matters who's telling the story.

John Hodges:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

There's a sense in which I wrote an article. This goes back decades, that the term Christian education has a redundancy to it. Any indication is necessarily Christian. We're studying God's creation and God and how he's providentially superintended his creation in order to understand what we're learning.

John Hodges:

That's right. That's right. The kind– what we consider education today is standing on the foundation of centuries of Christian belief. And what we're finding now, interestingly enough, in academia is that there are those who are committed atheists, or at least agnostic about the faith, who are beginning to see that the entire fabric of the culture will unravel if we give up Christianity.

And I'm thinking about Tom Holland, the historian, or Jordan Peterson, or the philosophers – now I'm going to blank on all these names since I haven't thought about it for a while. But anyway, what you're finding is– James Lindsay, I think in particular. James Lindsay has done a lot of good work lately. And what they're saying is I don't believe it myself, but if we don't go back to it, we're going to fall apart.

And it's because even the left political world, you know, the atheistic, left-leaning political world still is so steeped in Christian thought that though they reject Christianity outwardly, they still hold to Christian principles about what is right and wrong, but they just apply them wrong. So what we're seeing is the left is deeply involved with trying to help care for and look after the underprivileged, the minority, you know, the groups that are being oppressed.

But where do you get the idea that doing that is a good idea? Well, you don't get it from the Greeks. You don't get it from the Romans. You don't get it from the Chinese. You don't get the Japanese or the Africans. You get it from Christianity. That's where it comes from. You see, we have a Christ that hangs on a cross for the benefit of everyone else.

Most oppressed of all people in the history of the world is Jesus himself. And suddenly we have Him coming up out of the Roman Empire of a set of beliefs that are based on the Bible. And they then have informed us about what's right and wrong in the West forever. So we've got a West that's ignoring Christianity but embracing it without knowing it.

You know, it’s a schizophrenic thing. And people are beginning to see that. And even though they themselves are not willing to be hip enough to go back to belief, they are they're seeing that the fabric of the culture is actually going to disappear, it unravels.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's tough to build a building without a foundation.

John Hodges:

That's it. How do you start on the 12th floor?

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, yeah, it’s pretty amazing. But going back to Westminster for just a moment, describe it. How would you describe the school today?

John Hodges:

Oh, let's see. They are now, what, 26…27…28 years old? It's something like that. They have a fine headmaster and they have 480 students, something like that. It’s going very well. For the first time in the last couple of years, they are expanding from two sections per grade to three sections per grade.

Marlin Detweiler:

Big move.

John Hodges:

It's a big move. And as you know, doing so, you have to be you have to do that very carefully because you don't want to dilute the teacher quality, the teaching quality going on. You have to find faculty that can take on that extra section, that can continue that same quality level of work.

So it's a big deal, but they seem to be doing very well and they're well established now in the city after all these years. I was a founder and I was on the board for the first ten years or so, but I really haven't had much to do with it since then.

They'll have me in every once in a while to give a lecture or to speak to the board to try and remind them of the founding. You know, it's always interesting to remember.

Marlin Detweiler:

They're always good to be doing.

John Hodges:

Isn't it true that we all need to have that kind of reminder all the time?

Marlin Detweiler:

Where do you you may not be able to answer this well, but where do you see it? The school that is. Where do you see the school headed over the next ten years?

John Hodges:

Hmm. Well, I'd like to think that it would continue to grow without diluting the quality level. They don't own their building, but they've been renting from a very big church that has gotten smaller. And so this church has dwindled as the school has increased. And I think the rent from the school has been a help to the church.

But I'd like to eventually see them in their own building and with their own grounds and so on. But I think it's a big financial burden and you don't want to take that on very quickly either, but that would be lovely if they would have that, because as you and I both agree and I'm sure the atmosphere of the architecture and the atmosphere of the learning is important as well as the content of the learning. So we'd like to see them build something that would reflect their own beliefs.

Marlin Detweiler:

You started something some time ago, and I think this is where your focus is now. Is it true that the Center for Western Studies is where you're really focusing your time today?

John Hodges:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. We have– you know, after I was teaching at Creighton College and we put together a 4-semester team-taught humanities core curriculum, and it was the three faculty that worked on it together. There's a historian in each class as well as a literature person. And me and I did the art and music and philosophy stuff, and we found that we three were learning so much from each other because we were all trained in the old way, right, in that kind of with blinders on to any other aspect of education.

I remember when I was going to music school, the music building was on a square with the art building right next door. And I don't think I ever saw any music faculty talking to the art faculty. There just wasn't any interaction, you know, just airtight, that sort of thing. Anyway, we were all sort of trained that way, so we go with a smattering of the other guy's fields.

But to be able to sit in on lectures of the other two, we each got so much out of it. And then the conversation amongst the three of us in front of the class brought the class into all of that too. And what we were seeing was that kind of integrated, multifaceted way of teaching was really a help to the students to kind of triangulate on the ideas that we're trying to get across.

When the college itself kind of came to an end. Sadly, it's a long story and it's not important, really. We changed presidents and the vision of the president was different and things started to go a different way. And all of us began to realize that, you know, we kind of saw the writing on the wall. It's not going to be as emphasizing this kind of approach. So we all started thinking about where we could go from there. Well, I was a musician. I was already had a foot out in the music world, so I just stepped on to going on with my music career and left the college. But the other two, three or four guys stayed for a little longer, and eventually, they went and got other jobs too.

But we all said, “Wouldn't it be great if we could continue somehow to teach this kind of integrated study to young people, especially given how many are losing their faith in school when they go to college? Wouldn't it be great if we could give them some kind of a foundation before they go?”

In fact, at the same time, a couple of people who were parents at Westminster Academy had seniors that were about to go off to college. And the parents were wringing their hands about where to go and what to do. And one of them even came to me and said, what if we just give you the tuition and you teach our kids Well, that was nuts. That's crazy. We knew we couldn’t do that. But what made me start thinking, what could we do?

Well, what we decided we could do is give a gap year program. And so what we decided was we would do as much of our team taught sort of thing in one year, starting with the Greeks and working our way through to the postmodern and touching on five different areas that we thought were most influential in today's culture.

Where do we get the ideas that are influencing today's culture? And so we start with Homer and we work our way through and we read literature and music and art and architecture and philosophy. And so that's what we've done. And we started in 2008 with our first year and we've had a few students every year. We purposefully make the group small. We have a maximum of eight that we take every year and we've never had eight. It's always been less than that. And we study during the year and we travel in the spring. We take a rented apartment in Paris and one in London, and we take them over there and we take them to the Louvre and to the National Gallery and to Oxford and to Sharks and various places where they can see and understand and get firsthand information about the things that we've been talking about during the year.

Marlin Detweiler:

What a great experience. Now, that has been an in-person in Memphis and of course, travel, then traveling together to other places. But you've expanded it, too, haven't you? Isn't it more than that? If I remember correctly, you're doing some things online and you're also doing things with older people. With parents.

John Hodges:

That's right. That's right. A few years ago we started doing a podcast and they are still available on our website, https://www.centerws.com/. You can find them there or on any podcast app. But in the last 2 to 3 years, we haven't been able to do those and I can’t tell you why.

But it's interesting, fascinating things that God has brought us to. But we're going to pick those back up this fall, I think. But in addition to the in-person thing this year in particular, we had students that wanted to come and do the year, but they were in other countries and they couldn't get out of their country. They couldn't get visas to come and study.

And so we thought, well, could we do a kind of online gap year for them? And as we started thinking about it, we thought, well, we don't want to do that. That's not our favorite way. We want to do it in person. But if the only way we could do it for them would be online, right? The alternative is not to do it at all.

Well, then let's do it online. And that made us start thinking about all the adults that have said all along, whenever we talk to adults about their kids, the adults say, well, “What about us? We want to use it for us.” Well, we've never done it before, but we're planning this fall to have an online adult course that will teach much of what it is, not anywhere near all, but much of what we usually do for our gap year students.

It's going to be ten weeks in the fall, on one night a week, and ten weeks in the spring for one night a week. And all of that will be in preparation for a trip to Europe. So the things that we study are going to be directly connected to where we would go on a tour for the adults.

Marlin Detweiler:

I look forward to hearing how that goes. That sounds fascinating. There have been so many times over the course of our involvement through the schools that we have started and through Veritas Press that we've heard from parents, “I wish I had gotten that kind of education.” And you're asking a segment of the answer to that question, the kind of segment that a parent kind of can absorb with their jobs and responsibilities. And that's a busy schedule.

Do something full-time. Like a student's job is their career is to be a student. But parents generally can't do that. And you're providing a wonderful service there. That's really cool. Thank you.

And our last couple of minutes, I want to ask you something that I have thought about. I'm not a musician. I like music. I'm I wouldn't say I'm a sophisticated listener to music, but I'm not a novice either.

But I've always been fascinated by the idea that music has things that work and things that don't work. It has rules that musicians know. Yes, there are chords that resonate with our ability to hear as humans. There are sounds that become jazz or become I couldn't even name the terms you could. You know, there are different things that make the music distinctively something that is not something else.

And I'm a mathematician and I thought, I say, mathematician, I like math, I'm good at math. And when I think in terms of math and its connection to music, I wonder if there isn't some opportunity for that thinking to be developed and understood. Maybe it is, and I'm not aware of it, but tell me, tell me what has been developed that helps us understand maybe the science behind the aesthetic of music.

John Hodges:

Oh, my goodness. That's a huge topic. Wonderful topic.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, we have three minutes to talk about it!

John Hodges:

I've lectured on it for 30 years at least. And I wrote my graduate thesis on esthetics. So I'm really fascinated with the whole idea of how music makes sense to us and where it comes from mathematically is a great big part of that. Pythagoras probably is the father of all of that. This kind of discussion. He’s a pre-socratic philosopher, you know, and he studied ratios.

He was very interested in how it is that unit fractions on a vibrating string, relate to each other, and they do. If you take an entire string and pluck it and then you stop it at half the exact half point and pluck it, it gives you an octave higher, one octave higher. If you if you go to one-third a point, you get an octave and a fifth higher.

And if you go to a fourth point, it's, it's like having the half. So it's another octave higher than the length of the string. The fifth one-fifth of the string gives you two octaves and a third above. And if you combine all those notes together, it's a major triad, it's a major chord. So if the entire string is a C, then a third of the string, it's a G and a fifth of the string is an E, and C, E, G is the chord that we call the C chord, like you play on the guitar or the piano.

So one string actually vibrates at all of those frequencies at the same time. But you can hear the unit fraction parts. So one string actually provides you with a sense of harmony. You don't have to have more than one string to have harmony. Isn't that bizarre?

Marlin Detweiler:

This is the first time I have ever heard anyone really articulate that these things have been done and not only been done, but they've been done way back, I assume, still being applied and still being developed as if it's a current conversation.

John Hodges:

That's right. It's the basis of every instrument that we have. If you think about the guitar, you got a string, right? And you tie it off with this and you tie it off at this end and then you put frets on it so that you can stop that string at various places. Well, half of the string and the third of the string fourth is the strength of the string give you these overtones so that that one low e on the guitar, for example, you hear A, B and a G sharp very faintly because they're in there. And then if you play the B's and G, Sharps and other E's above that, on the other strings, you get what they call in the E chord on the guitar, because all those other strings are reinforcing the harmonics of that bass note. Does that make sense?

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. So that's fascinating.

John Hodges:

It's the wonderful thing about music is that because you have some pitches that are in are in consonance with that low string, you can have pitches that are not in consonance with that low string, and that's where you get tension in music. You play notes that are not in that low string, and it gives you a sense of dissonance.

And music is all about going from consonance to dissonance and then back to consonance again. And so in a sense, music is telling a story. It's starting at home and it's going away to some foreign land, and then it's coming back home again to resolution. You see. So it's a very abstract way of telling stories.

Marlin Detweiler:

To me. It is a sad thing that we have not learned the basics in many things that are so easy to learn and so easy to understand. That doesn't mean we're going to be experts in every area. But that kind of education that you just gave over the last three or 4 minutes is what I see happening in classical Christian education.

And it's exciting to see those things coming back. Yes, I think we're behind the curve, quite honestly, with the aesthetics, the study of things beautiful. And you just pointed out in very objective ways opportunities for us to take advantage of, to move that forward and not be behind the curve anymore. John, thank you so much for joining us today.

John Hodges:

Oh, certainly. Can I throw in one quick verse that supports some of this? I’ll just close with this, Psalm 27, verse four says, “One thing I ask the Lord that I may dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of my life…” to do a particular thing. And that particular thing is to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord as though beauty is in him.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah.

John Hodges:

And so everything that we see in this world that's beautiful, that stirs us up and is a way for him to draw us closer to him. So beauty and harmony is a kind of beauty. All of that ties together because God himself is not only true and good, but He's beautiful.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, What a great close. Thank you so much. Folks you have been with us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you, John.

John Hodges:

My pleasure.