Were Christians Wrong About Harry Potter? | Brandon Vogt

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Brandon Vogt, author, Founder of ClaritasU, Senior Publishing Director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire, and Founder and Chairman of Chesterton Academy of Orlando. They discuss his journey in founding a Chesterton school in Orlando and what inspired him to choose its curriculum for his children. They explore Brandon’s defense of the Harry Potter series as rich in Christian virtue and having the power to re-enchant reality. 

Read Brandon Vogt on Catholics and Harry Potter: https://brandonvogt.com/potter/

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.443)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. Our guest today is a champion for classical education. name many of you will know already from Father Bishop Baron's Word on Fire, Brandon Vought. Welcome, Brandon. Thank you for coming to the Anchor Podcast.

Brandon Vogt (00:16.952)
Thanks Jeremy, my pleasure, good to be with you.

Jeremy Tate (00:19.587)
So Brandon, you are the bestselling author of 13 books, the founder of Claritas U, which trains Catholics how to talk about their faith, especially some of the hot button issues. For a number of years, you've been working with Bishop Barron, Word on Fire, where published over 150 books, selling 7 million copies. You're also the founder and chairman of Chesterton Academy. We love Chestertons here at CLT, Chesterton Academy of Orlando, a classical high school grounded in the Catholic faith tradition.

and you're also the father of nine kids, which is amazing. So thrilled to have you with us today.

Brandon Vogt (00:55.404)
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. sounds like I live a much busier life when you read the bio than I feel it actually is.

Jeremy Tate (01:00.601)
Now, Brennan, as we often do on the Anchor Podcast, I'd to hear about kind of your early days if you were growing up in a passionately Christian home. Were you going to Catholic school? What was that like?

Brandon Vogt (01:14.466)
Yeah, good question. I was not raised Catholic. I didn't become Catholic till I was in college. I grew up in kind of a nominally Christian home. We went to a Presbyterian church every Sunday, you know, taught me good morals, good basic, you know, kindness, compassion, basic virtues. I wouldn't say it was a deeply ingrained faith. I went to public schools all growing up, public elementary, middle and high school, had a very mediocre experience.

the level of education was pretty low, the demands were very low. I remember, and I tell people this all the time, it's ironic now that I'm a bibliophile who runs a publishing department, but when I was in high school, I remember only finishing one book cover to cover, and it was the weirdest book. was John Owen, A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Jeremy Tate (01:55.737)
you

Jeremy Tate (02:07.319)
Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Vogt (02:07.342)
Which was assigned in high school and for whatever reason that struck me and I read that one But I can't remember finishing any other book was still able to get straight A's So I think that kind of highlights the the demand the low bar that we had to clear in high school I was able pretty well doing any serious work, but then I went to Florida State had a good experience there I majored in mechanical engineering and physics and so a lot of math and science again not

Jeremy Tate (02:22.157)
Sure, yeah.

Brandon Vogt (02:35.542)
not a lot of literature, philosophy, classics, none of that. But it was during that period where I kind of self-discovered a lot of that great tradition. And that tributary along with the theologians and church fathers I was reading drew me into Catholicism. And my senior year, a couple weeks before I graduated, I entered the Catholic Church.

Jeremy Tate (02:59.075)
Now is this through a campus ministry? Florida State Engineering, I mean, this is not how you would think you'd discover the faith.

Brandon Vogt (03:06.446)
Yeah, not the traditional path. When I got to college, I, through a stroke of grace, became involved with the Methodist campus ministry. I remember when I was a freshman waking up the first Sunday morning and thought, you know, I don't really want to go to church, but I know my mom's going to ask me if I went to church, and so I'm just going to go to whatever church is closest to my dorm. And it happened to be a Methodist church, it's right across the street. So I went there and for two years would just show up on Sundays, listen to the sermon, go back to my dorm.

I didn't talk to anybody, I didn't get involved. But the end of my sophomore year, a group of guys there started kind of noticing me, befriending me, inviting me to hang out, play basketball. And as the story goes, know, it drew me into a Bible study, drew me into their community and discipled me. They introduced me to Christ, they taught me how to pray and read scripture and my faith came alive. I became captivated by the person of Christ and wanted to learn more and know him more deeply.

So I became so on fire for my faith, my sophomore junior year that I was even thinking about pursuing the seminary in the Methodist tradition. But then it was my junior year where Catholicism came on my radar. I was dating my now wife who was born and raised Catholic. So we started asking the obvious questions about when we get married, what church are we going to attend? The Methodist church, Catholic church, both.

Jeremy Tate (04:15.801)
Okay, okay.

Brandon Vogt (04:31.726)
And I realized I didn't know any Catholics besides her. I didn't know anything about Catholicism. And so I thought at least out of love and honor for her, I should look into this. And so I started reading book after book. And the key connection for me there was there's a religious order that runs the campus ministry at Florida State called the Brotherhood of Hope. Interestingly, we're on the Anchored podcast. The anchor is their symbol, the Brotherhood of Hope.

And so they were at Florida State and one of the brothers there who was also a convert to Catholicism and a former physics major at Florida State. So he shared my exact background. He took me under his wing and started meeting with me and mentoring me. And it was through his friendship that I entered the Catholic Church. And so I went through the RCIA process, became Catholic, and then the rest is history.

Jeremy Tate (05:24.013)
when you think about your conversion, not just to Catholicism, but even before that and kind of embracing, internalizing the gospel in the Methodist context, were you also rethinking kind of some of your own education and how you had come to have the world that you had?

Brandon Vogt (05:42.71)
Yeah, I did. Those two paths were parallel. I'll tell you, I think what changed it the most for me was falling in love with C.S. Lewis and then reading his autobiography and other biographies about him and looking at how he was educated. Because I so deeply admired him and revered him that I thought what made him the way he was? How did his mind become so clear and sharp? How did his writing become so tight and well-reasoned? And then I discovered this guy was

Jeremy Tate (06:03.091)
Yeah

Brandon Vogt (06:12.64)
effectively classically educated. He's been sent to a private tutor when he was 10, 12 years old and he's translating Virgil as a little kid from Latin into English. And he was completely fluent in Greek and in Latin. And so that's what first exposed me to, huh, there's a much different way he was educated than the way I was educated. His education was so much more based in

Jeremy Tate (06:19.193)
Mmm.

Jeremy Tate (06:36.185)
Yeah.

Brandon Vogt (06:39.584)
literature, philosophy, languages. It was comprehensive. It was integrated. And it was around that time that I discovered GK Chesterton, who was another sort of threshold person for me because Chesterton opened up the world of Catholicism. And I became so drawn to him that I later became a board member of the Society of GK Chesterton, which then opened up the world of Chesterton schools. And that led me to start this school. So that was...

Jeremy Tate (06:55.533)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (07:04.035)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (07:07.589)
We love Dale Alquist and he's been a great member of the CLT board, so that's since 2016 or 2017. Brandon, one of my favorite anecdotes about Lewis, his mother was very scared that him or Warnie would get sick playing in the rain. And so if it was raining, which it was always raining in Ireland, then she would keep him in the house, but they would cause trouble in the house. So they would end up in the attic where there were just piles and piles of books.

And so maybe apart from his mother's almost irrational fear of the boys getting sick, Lewis would not have been so inundated with reading this great rich history and being so drawn into the Western literary tradition.

Brandon Vogt (07:45.016)
He's got a, I he's got a line in surprised by joy about his earliest memories are just of endless attics and shelves full of books. I remember, if this is a true anecdote, but somewhere I remember hearing he said, we didn't even know what color the walls were because bookcases and books were just covering the walls. And I thought, a dream childhood that must have been.

Jeremy Tate (07:53.293)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (08:01.529)
Yeah.

Love that. Well, let's talk about Chesterton Orlando, Chesterton Network, dear friends of CLT, there's 70 or 80. It's an incredible story. McDale started this to solve the problem of educating his own children in a diner in Minnesota in 2008 or so. And now there's 70 or 80 Chestertons around the country. I've been to Chesterton Orlando. is such a vibrant school. How did you find yourself getting involved in this?

Brandon Vogt (08:33.016)
Yeah, well, like I said, I was blessed to have essentially a front row seat to the expansion of this network serving on the board of the society for several years, which oversees all of these Chesterton schools. And so I was seeing the flourishing of these schools, the impressive graduates that they were producing. was meeting these high schoolers, you know, who could hold eye contact and shake hands and recite poetry and ballroom dance. And they're reading, you know, Homer and Virgil and Plato and Dante and Shakespeare and Aquinas. And I'm like,

First of all, that's what I want for my kids. And so a number of us parents here in Orlando realized whatever produced that is what we want. And so we got together to start this school. And that's how all these schools have started. The Chesterton Schools Network doesn't plant schools. don't do market research and identify a location and say, we're going to put a school there. It's all from the ground up. They emerge from groups of local families who

recognize the value of classical Catholic education who want it and are willing to work and sacrifice to make it happen. But then they provide this amazing template. They've really refined the model. They call it a school in a box. We'll give you everything you need, the plans, the timelines, the templates, the forms, everything you need to get this thing up and going. And then, of course, the curriculum, which is the biggest part of it.

Jeremy Tate (09:38.627)
Yeah.

Brandon Vogt (09:52.544)
And so, yeah, you said 70, 80. The last I heard is up to 93 schools that are in the Chesterton Schools Network. So I think it's the largest network of classical schools in the world. There's nothing like it. It's exploded all over the world.

Jeremy Tate (10:03.939)
Well, yeah.

Dale said he asked the question, if Chesterton were to start a school, what would it be like? that was like the driving question of the whole, this explosive Chesterton network. For folks who don't know much about this, can you kind of just give us a bit of an overview for the four years of Chesterton Academy?

Brandon Vogt (10:28.268)
Yeah, so Dale, I think, did something really impressive back in the mid 2000s. He was, you know, and is the world's greatest expert on GK Chesterton. And so because of that, he's invited to speak all over the place. And so in the mid 2000s, he was speaking at a lot of these fairly new classical schools that were sprouting up and doing impressive things. And he started taking notes and noting best practices from each of these schools. this one has a really good virtue program or the house system from this one or the

you know, the science curriculum from this one and, put all that together to create the first Chesterton Academy. So he, he, I think created the best of all that was happening at that time. so that was the first one. And then very soon after again, families from other cities began calling them and saying, Hey, what you're doing there, we want to do here. Can you help us? And, and unexpectedly he found himself, you know, plant, helping to plant other schools. It was not something that he or his co-founders intended to do. just.

emerged as a work of the spirit. A lot of what we do, I think is similar to a lot of classical models. All of our students take four years of Latin, four years of philosophy, four years of theology. There's a very robust fine arts program. So every student sings in the choir for four years, not optional. Every student is in drama for three years. So they act on the stage, they do comedies and mysteries and a Shakespearean play. Every student takes four years of art.

the curriculum is integrated. So each of the disciplines are woven together. And the way they do that is through a four year progression. So the freshman year is the ancient period. So they're learning about the Greeks and the Romans and prehistory, of course. And that goes across literature, philosophy, science, math, they're reading Euclid and math. So that's first year. Second year is kind of the Christian period in the early medieval.

Jeremy Tate (12:05.593)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Vogt (12:25.71)
period, junior years, late medieval period, Renaissance, and then the senior year is kind of the modern era. So it follows this chronological trajectory through all four years, which I love. I think students, correct, all disciplines, all disciplines. So everything is woven together in this thread of history that underscores the very Christian understanding of history, which is that it's driving somewhere. know, history is not just this random disparate connection of events.

Jeremy Tate (12:36.589)
And it's doing that across disciplines, in literature and in history.

Brandon Vogt (12:55.628)
The subjects are not all independent from each other. We believe that all of human history is the result of a rational mind. It's all connected. And the curriculum at Chesterton reflects that. And then the hope is that by the time these young people are seniors, that they now have seen where all of history has gone, how its early stages of groping and grasping and discovery and then.

the pinnacle of the Christian medieval period and then how it's gone awry during the modern period. And then now they're forced to make a choice. Do you want to go down the path of Machiavelli and Kant and Sartre and Nietzsche, or do you want to go down the path of Chesterton and Aquinas and Newman and Augustine and all those? So we're hoping that it leads to them to, from there, choose Christ, to choose truth and beauty and goodness for the rest of their lives.

Jeremy Tate (13:50.585)
One of the I love so much about Chesterton and Annapolis right here, they go to mass every morning at 8 a.m. at St. John Newman Church. And probably the older parishioners, it's tripled, of older parishioners who are going to mass there, just as there aren't all these young people. I would go years ago before Chesterton started, there was very few people, probably 100 people now with this school there. And it really has been a way to really carry out, which I know you're so passionate about, the new evangelization.

This area, this term, and we've got a lot of Catholics, non-Catholics listening to the Anchor podcast. This term, the new evangelization, I believe coined by John Paul II. What does this term mean and how is it carried out in the realm of education?

Brandon Vogt (14:35.63)
Yeah, so Pope St. John Paul II, maybe the heroic figure of the 20th century, about a year after he was elected pope in 1979, he uses this term for the first time and new evangelization for him meant a re-evangelizing, a re-proposal of the gospel to people who maybe were baptized, maybe catechized a little, but they never encountered Christ in a personal and profound way.

So he recognized what we all know now today that, know, vast numbers of Catholics and Protestants, you know, have gone through our churches as young people. They've been a little, they've, you know, maybe baptized, maybe confirmed, maybe a little bit of religious education, but it never really landed in their heart. And so when they get to high school, college, they drift away. And so John Paul recognized that this is the true task is.

It's no longer what he calls the mission agentes, the mission to the Gentiles, which is missionaries to far off lands, to people who have never heard of Christianity or Christ. Thanks to today's communication, that number is increasingly small. The big task today is re-evangelizing people who have once been in here but have now drifted away and left. That's, I think, perfectly fits with the mission of Chesterton Academy. In fact, our motto is evangelization.

through education, introducing young minds to truth and goodness and beauty and showing how they find their fulfillment in God, I think is proven to be one of the most effective ways to deepen and solidify their faith.

Jeremy Tate (15:59.459)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (16:12.729)
That's beautiful. Now as the title for this podcast suggests, we're gonna get into this loaded question. I mean, 25 years after the release of the first Harry Potter, a lot of folks say, away, stay away, stay away. And I believe at one point even maybe Pope Benedict weighed in on this. You've been very clear, Harry Potter is not bad. Harry Potter is good for children to read. We may get some folks emailing CLT after dropping this podcast. Brandon, love DC.

here I never got it and I was always like I listened enough to not you know ban it in our house and most my kids ended up reading it but I never understood like why the Lord of the Rings was so like two thumbs up and Harry Potter's like two thumbs down. Alright so I love to hear you weigh in on this and your the line of your thinking here.

Brandon Vogt (17:03.98)
Yeah, so I told you before we started recording, this is a hill that I'm willing to die on. think, and let me see how bold I can make this statement. I think Harry Potter is one of the best expressions of the Christian gospel in contemporary literature. It's hard to make that case without a bunch of spoilers, so I'll resist doing so. I have a whole video and website where I lay out the case for that. But let me just say a couple quick things. One,

Jeremy Tate (17:08.441)
Fuck, fuck.

Jeremy Tate (17:24.952)
Okay.

Brandon Vogt (17:32.46)
I think most of the arguments against Harry Potter would either preclude kids from reading things like Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings, any knee-jerk reaction to magic. If magic's in the books, it's off limits. I think that would preclude a lot of other books that most Christian parents are fine reading. Second, J.K. Rowling, the author of the series, has been very adamant in numerous interviews that she intended this book to be laden with

Christian symbolism and themes. And in fact, she was worried she was putting it on too thickly. There's a couple of moments in the later books where there are key verses from scripture that are cited in the books as sort of pivot points. They play very important roles. And again, she said, when I put those verses in there, I thought I was I was being too on the nose about it, that people would reject the books for being too Christian. And so I find it ironic that they're being criticized for the opposite reason.

Jeremy Tate (18:07.907)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (18:26.487)
Ha ha.

Brandon Vogt (18:31.726)
I would never say all parents or kids have to read them or they should read them or they ought to read them. Every parent should be discerning with their kids. I think we have family friends for whom it's just not a good fit. Maybe their kids are a little bit more sensitive to spiritualism or occultism or things like that. And so they've discerned for their family, it's not a good fit. Great. I think every parent should discern that for themselves. But I do think a strong case could be made that these books are drenched and

truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals we've been discussing here. And Harry himself is such a Christ figure. again, without spoiling anything, think anybody who's read the books through a Christian sensibility can easily see that.

Jeremy Tate (19:17.551)
They have such a hooking power on children.

My boys devoured them, read all of the books. And it was like the book I wasn't necessarily trying to get them to read, but it just kind of took off. I mean, what was that ability to get so, I mean, there's something just beautifully childlike, I think, that's being tapped into there. Can you speak into that?

Brandon Vogt (19:42.838)
Yeah, a few things. Unlike much of the literati, I actually think JK Rowling is a talented writer. I think she has tremendous capacity to write gripping fiction. So I think her writing style contributed to that. think kids are drawn to the book because they re-enchant reality. There's been a lot of talk in the Christian world about enchantment and disenchantment. We live in this flattened out secular world.

Jeremy Tate (20:07.545)
Hmm.

Brandon Vogt (20:09.25)
those books, just like Narnia, just like Middle Earth, convey the reality that there's far more beneath or above the surface, you might say, than initially appears. In Harry Potter's case, there's explicit magic going on, but there's also providence, there's invisible forces at play. So I think kids are drawn to that because they innately recognize that, yeah, there is more to this world than what we can sense. And that's exciting and intriguing.

It's a very pro-life and pro-family book. The Weasley family, for those who have read it, I think is one of the best depictions of a beautiful, large, loyal family. think kids want a family like that, so they're drawn to reading about it. There's a lot more I can say. I would argue as a Christian that I think the innate Christian symbolism and trajectory of the series as a whole just resonates with

the basic longings of the human heart. And I think even kids can pick up on that.

Jeremy Tate (21:12.601)
Erin and I listened to the podcast series, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. And it's actually a great way to just think through the history of social media and really just the past 30 years. know, where early days, know, J.K. Rowling is kind of being canceled, maybe on the far right, you know, sorcery and all of this. And then, you know, now she's one of the people saying that men can't have babies and she's been, you know.

Brandon Vogt (21:16.291)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (21:39.043)
canceled on the far left. it's really been a, I would recommend that to our listeners as well. You enjoyed that series.

Brandon Vogt (21:46.692)
I loved it. Yeah. And I think I'll make another bold statement. I think J.K. Rowling is one of the heroic figures of our day. I think she was very prescient and standing against the transgender ideology. And she's been vindicated. think a lot of what she said has come to be proven true. And she's she's an interesting figure for the reason you describe that she's criticized by both extremes for mutually contradictory reasons.

Bishop Barron, who I work with, is in a similar boat. And so is Jesus. Chesterton's got this great line about Jesus. I think it's an orthodoxy where he says, you know, if a man is being criticized for being too fat and too thin, too tall, too short, you do this, do that, it could be that he's in odd shape.

Jeremy Tate (22:21.155)
you

Jeremy Tate (22:30.701)
Yeah.

He's an odd-looking man.

Brandon Vogt (22:37.994)
And or he said it could be that all of his critics were off to varying degrees and that it was the critics who were seeing things wrongly. He was the rightly sized person. I feel similarly about J.K. Rowling. I think the criticisms of her both from the left and the right have been equally misguided.

Jeremy Tate (22:59.511)
Well, and thanks to you for your courage and conviction and speaking on this. Can you offer some light though in why, and I don't know this, but my understanding was that the did say something negative. Is that accurate, Benedict?

Brandon Vogt (23:13.024)
No, so I cover this in the video that I produced on it. So Pope Benedict, before he was Pope, he was Joseph Ratzinger and he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is the Vatican's doctrinal office. And there was a German woman who wrote a book critical of Harry Potter and sent it to him. And he sent back a perfunctory letter. And there's even speculation that he didn't even write it. It just has his signature. If someone else in the office wrote it.

But it was pretty mundane. It says something like, thank you for sending along this book. I appreciate, you know, your work and the service of truth. And the key line was something like, yes, we should warn people about the evil of, you know, demonic influences or witchcraft or something like that. Zero evidence that Pope Benedict had read the books, was familiar with the books. It was a very form-perfunctory letter, right?

Jeremy Tate (23:57.559)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (24:02.265)
Okay.

Brandon Vogt (24:06.862)
Well, that lady then released the second edition of the book in which she took that line after after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict after he's elected pope a second edition of the book with that line on the cover as a blurb a blurb from Pope Benedict, you know, saying that her critical book of Harry Potter was, you know, was well received and I'm grateful for it and things like that. so that's where that rumor originated. In the Catholic world, there's there's a couple more criticisms people float.

Jeremy Tate (24:16.547)
that.

Jeremy Tate (24:26.905)
wow, okay.

Brandon Vogt (24:36.994)
There have been a number, two, three, four prominent exorcists who have discouraged the reading of the books for various reasons. I won't get into the details about their criticisms. I responded to them in this resource on my website. And again, I think there is something to say that if a family or if children are particularly susceptible to dark powers, they should exercise discernment and maybe not read it. It's not obligatory for any person. But I don't think

Jeremy Tate (25:04.995)
Thank you.

Brandon Vogt (25:06.758)
for example, one of the exorcists claimed that the spells in Harry Potter are real spells and that if you utter these words that you're invoking dark powers and it's just laughable for anybody that these spells are like made up amalgamations of Latin words, they're not real things and in fact they're intended to be funny, some of them, the Latin phraseology. One of the exorcists claimed that he has

encountered demons who were named, who have names of characters in the Harry Potter books. And again, I don't mean to make light of that or to question his sincerity, but to me it's implausible and I don't think it's a strong reason not to read the books. Maybe a couple others. sometimes argue the books glorify evil behavior. There's scenes in the books where Harry Potter and his friends lie to adults.

But if you read the books, you discover that lying ultimately is never praised. Things don't go well when the kids lie and they ultimately realize, we should have been honest with the adults because then we could have avoided all these bad things that happened. Anyway, I think the critiques are far outweighed by the merits of the books. And so that's why I'm generally a proponent.

Jeremy Tate (26:14.617)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (26:30.595)
We always conclude the Anchor Podcast talking about the book that has been most formative for our guests. Perhaps it's a book you go back and reread time and time again. What has that been for you?

Brandon Vogt (26:35.736)
Mm.

Brandon Vogt (26:40.704)
Unquestionably, Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I've read that so many times. In fact, I was reading an interview about another Tolkien fan and they said, I don't think I've ever not been reading Lord of the Rings. You kind of just go through it and go back and start over and you're kind of always in it. reading two towers with one of my kids, Fellowship with one of my kids, Hobbit with one of my kids. so that book has had an immeasurable impact on the way I see

Jeremy Tate (26:53.971)
Bye.

Jeremy Tate (27:02.711)
Ha ha ha ha.

Brandon Vogt (27:09.186)
the world and the more I read it, the deeper I appreciate the way that Tolkien sees his sacramental imagination, I think is the best way to put it. He sees the whole world imbued with the glory of God, these themes of providence, friendship, loyalty, faith, beauty, even in the midst of darkness and evil. It's the best written work of fiction in the 20th century, I would argue.

Jeremy Tate (27:21.049)
Hmm.

Brandon Vogt (27:38.818)
So that book on the fiction side, the non-fiction side, unquestionably orthodoxy by GK Chesterton. I first read this book in college. Really, would you say those two?

Jeremy Tate (27:38.967)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (27:47.181)
We are kindred spirits. mean, those are literally my Those are my two as well.

Brandon Vogt (27:52.524)
Now, I'm curious for you, when I first read Orthodoxy, I was 21 years old, I probably understood 5 % of it, 10 % of it, but I knew this man has something and sees something in the world that I want and that I want to, I wanna see the world the way he does. And it was only after several other readings of the book that I began to appreciate the Chestertonian lens that I now adopt.

Jeremy Tate (28:01.379)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (28:17.251)
Yeah, I laugh all the way through it. I mean, I think he's so funny. He's so observant. It's almost like Chesterton just came down from another planet and was just taking notes and watching.

Brandon Vogt (28:29.688)
He's a singular figure. There's no one like him in history, but especially in the 20th century, he was such a unique, singular personality.

Jeremy Tate (28:39.747)
Brandon Vogt, thank you for the work you're doing at Chesterton Academy of Orlando. Thank you for the great work you're doing with Bishop Barron for Word on Fire. Thank you for the great book recommendations and please come back on the Anchored Podcast and join us again in the future.

Brandon Vogt (28:55.95)
Thanks, Jeremy. And thanks for all you do with the CLT. As you know, I'm a huge proponent. We use it at Chesterton Academy. In fact, our school was one of the early advocates for it in Florida. We helped to get it on the standardized list in Florida to break up the duopoly of the SAT and the ACT. So we are thrilled with CLT and look forward to using it for many years.

Jeremy Tate (29:18.379)
Amen. Very, very grateful for that. Thank you, Brandon.