We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. We have a special guest on today's show.
It's not often that you get to actually interview someone you consider a mentor,
but I'm joined today by Kimberly Beg, who is the author of a
truly wonderful new book. I really encourage you, especially if you're a parent,
but not just if you're a parent, to go out and get Unbreakable
Saints who inspired Saints to moral courage. Kimberly is also the editor of Catholic
School Playbook, and she's a project advisor for Run with Saints. I know
Kimberly, of course, because she's a long time staff member board member at
Young America's Foundation where we're recording this podcast. Actually, so Kimberly welcome.
Thank you, Emily. I'm thrilled to be here. So I texted Kimberly
I picked up a copy of the book, and I texted Kimberly like halfway
through the book that I was loving it. And then I texted her like
two hours later saying I'd finished it because it was so so readable. And
this is, by the way, Kimberly, another edition of what our listeners
enjoy as Lutheran's attempt to talk to Catholics, which happens like every week,
because you Catholics write so many books. But what a beautiful book. Congratulations
on it and tell us just a little bit. Because you're a mother of
many children, I imagine that inspired the idea behind this book. What made
you want to write Unbreakable? Well, thank you, Emily. First of
all, that is high praise coming from you, and it's so neat that
you call me a mentor, because honestly, I have admired your work so
much. In fact, I've often thought that one of the worst days at
Young America's Foundation was a day that you came into my office and told me
that you were leaving the staff. So I am very grateful that you corrected
that terrible mistake that you are now the executive director of our National Journalism Center.
So thank you very much while as for the inspiration for the book.
We are living in a moment of great confusion in the world. We are
even a lot of Christians don't know who they are and why they were made.
They don't have an understanding of their duties in the world, their duties
to God, their duties to their family. And as a result, a
lot of people, and especially a lot of parents, are trying to find
a way around the cross for themselves and their children. But in Christianity,
this idea that there is a way around the cross, this idea that your
path, on your way to heaven can ever be free of sacrifice and suffering,
has absolutely no grounding in sacred scripture or the traditions of the Church.
And one of the greatest traditions of the Church that we have are the stories
of the Saints. So a few years ago I gave a presentation to Young
America's Foundation, and I gave the presentation on Blessed Yergi Papishko. And if
you're not familiar with Father Yurgi, he was the very courageous priest in Communist
Poland after World War Two who was the chaplain of the Solidarity movement, and
he helped millions of people throughout Poland, throughout the Eastern Bloc, throughout the
world see through the lives of communism by his courageous homilies. He was a
truth teller, a courageous truthteller. So in doing my research for this presentation,
I made this wonderful discovery that Father Yurgi's favorite saint, beginning when he
was a little kid, was Saint Maximilian Colby. And he actually learned about
Saint Maximilian Colby going to his grandmother's house as a little boy and reading Father
Colby's Knights of the Immaculata, which was Father cole These newspaper. So when
I learned this wonderful discovery about Blessed Yergy, the whole rest of his life
made sense to me. I believe that you can't really understand a person without
understanding their heroes, that the people that they admired throughout their lives. And
you can see the steady progression and these repeated acts of courage in Father Yergi's
life all the way through to his death. So that's where the idea for
the book came from. Paul Kangar is a good friend of mine. He
was also giving a presentation at that seminar for Young America's Foundation. He and
I chatted about it, thought it would be a great idea for a book.
He became my editor. Fast forward a couple of years and here we
are talking about it. And you know, there's something in your introduction which
I thought was beautifully written. It's worth reading in and of itself. It's
it's a wonderful piece of writing. But you say something to the extent of,
we can't understand or we can't minimize, I think is the word you
use, the importance of the images the stories that dance in child's imagination.
And I loved the way you put that. Can you flesh that out a
little bit, especially, and maybe give people some idea of your kid's age
range? Yes, as you were writing this, because I imagine that was
in your head too, Yes, And I appreciate you pointing that out.
There has been a very dangerous trend in education over the last several decades to
focus on skills and not to focus on content. So, for example,
we often teach kindergarteners and first graders and second graders how to read using sentences
that are meaningless, using books that have nothing beautiful about them, and the
focus is on skills, almost like it's a waste that your brain can't handle
beauty, that they can't handle the extra information. But we are robbing children
of the opportunity to be inspired, you know, to understand who they are
as human beings, and to really get a sense of the richness of the
human experience. So that's some thing that was very much in my mind too,
because the Catholic Church, I think, over the last few years,
has gotten better about instilling a love of the most courageous saints in young people.
But I grew up as a Catholic in New Jersey in the nineteen seventies
and nineteen eighties, and I was wholly unfamiliar with not only the saints in
this book, but the vast majority of Catholic saints. And I think what
that does is when you are robbed of the history of you know, so
many of the heroes that generations before us have had to look up to.
What it does is it makes you feel like you're the first person ever encountering
a challenge, and that is so untrue. I mean, you look at
the challenges that the saints in this book and the saints throughout the history of
the world have had to encounter. You know, you feel better equipped to
challenge, to encounter whatever challenges that you have in front of you. You
know, I mentioned the trend of focusing on skills, and this other trend
is that we try to give kids today stories that are relatable to them,
and we have this idea that they can only understand the challenge of a character
in a book if they are from the same kind of family, if they
live in the same part of the world, if they are from that same
time period. But actually, I think that the more powerful stories for children
and people of all ages are those that speak to eternal truths, because when
you read about somebody who lived centuries before you in a different part of the
world, with different circumstances, what that does is it allows you to draw
parallels that you can see as bigger than yourself, that you can see as
eternal. So, yes, there was a lot of intentionality of putting stories
in the book that would appeal to young people. Five of the fourteen saints
in the book are actually children or teenagers, and I was very much thinking
along the lines of you know, what are the kind of stories that are
going to inspire children that I see in my day to day life. So
my children are now nine years old up to seventeen years old. In fact,
today is my son, Charlie's seventeenth birthday, right, Happy birthday,
Charlie. And my youngest my baby's ninth birthday was two days ago, so
I know. So August is a busy month for us. So we have
a nine year old and eleven year old, at thirteen year old, at
fifteen year old, and a now seventeen year old. So I have three
teen teenagers. And I wrote the book very much to be inspirational for parents,
but also to be appropriate for read alouds for kids of all ages,
and then appropriate for independent reading for kids twelve years old and up. I
wanted teenagers who were very accustomed to reading Harry Potter and other books that go
very very quickly. My eleven year old daughter loves the Rangers Apprentice series.
She's read all of them like five times, and I was thinking of her,
thinking of a book that she would be able to pick up, be
able to understand, be able to get through quickly, but also to be
able to understand just the challenges that each of these saints lived through in their
lives. You don't dumb it down at all. Actually, I felt like
it was a history book, and I think that's why I devoured And the
history is amazing. There was so much I didn't know actually about Joan of
Arc. You tell the story of Joan of Bark in great detail, and
I feel like as a reader, that story resonates with you a lot.
What, if anything, did you learn about Johan of Bark that sort of
sticks with you since you researched it in such detail. I learned so much.
I thought that I knew Joan's story until I researched her story. And
in fact, the chapter on Joan of Arc is the first chapter in the
book, but it is actually the last chapter that I wrote. And it
took me about twice as long to write the chapter on Joan than it did
to write the other chapters. And part of the reason is because we actually
have more information about Joan of Arc and we do about any figure who lived
in history before her time, and that is because she had her trials and
her retrials, and we have this just wealth of testimony not just from Joan
but from those around her that they interviewed, so there was a lot of
information to go through. But what I found most interesting about Joan is,
you know, we all know that it was Saint Michael, the archangel who
inspired her and interceded for her. So he visited her for the first time
when she was thirteen years old, and continued to visit her until she left
home for the first time at age sixteen, and then throughout her time in
battle up until the burning of her at the Stake at age nineteen. But
what was most fascinating to me I had known that there were other saints who
had appeared to her and who had inspired her and interceded for her. Those
two saints were teenage martyrs who died in the early fourth century. They were
victims of the Diocletian persecutions, and they, as I said, were teenagers.
So like Joan, they had to go out in the world and defend
their faith against hostile people who very much wanted to humiliate them, and who
wanted to defeat them, and who wanted to silence them. And that is
what Joan had to encounter time and time again throughout her life. You know,
one of the things that I found fascinating is that all of the saints
in the book were inspired by saints that are no longer familiar to us in
the modern age. And that is especially true of these teenage saints who inspire
Joan. So Saint Margaret of Antioch is one of them, and Saint Catherine
of Alexandria was the other. Saint Margaret of Antioch was the daughter of a
pagan priest, and her father had found out that she'd become a Christian kicked
her out of the house. She had to live on her own, like
Joan, had to survive on her own without her parents. As she was
making her way first to Voculer to seek the assistance of the captain of a
fortress, she actually had to convince, as sixteen years old, the captain
of a fortress that she had been given this mission by God to save the
French from the English, to drive the English out of Orleans and drive the
English out of France. This must have seemed like the most bizarre, impossible
story that the captain of the fortress had ever heard. He told her to
go home to her father, and she had to. You know, at
that, at that moment, build up the courage. You know, you
can look at her burning at the stake and her trials that she had to
endure, being wooded in battle, but actually the courage to take that first
step again to visit this man who was enraged that she had wasted his time
to re quest and escort so that she could travel, if a three hundred
and fifty miles to go see the Dauphin Charles the Seventh, who was the
rifle King. The courage that that alone must have taken, I think is
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Romo code Carter. I'm wondering, especially because this is something you think about
a lot, the idea of raising children in the culture of America at twenty
twenty three, a very hostile culture. Obviously, there are a lot of
parallels in the stories that you tell and Unbreakable. Does that resonate Do you
find that that resonates with kids who are sort of brought up to be aware
that they're in a hostile culture, which is not the majority of kids,
but a lot of the kids that you work with, certainly your own children,
and a lot of their friends, I imagine, are very aware that
they're swimming in this dark, hostile culture. Do these stories resonate for that
reason? It just seems so heavy but so obvious. Well, I think
that they do. You mentioned the introduction, and one of the themes that
I discuss in the introduction is our desire for happiness. So most parents today,
if you ask them what they want for their kids, they will tell
you in this line. I hear it all the time. I just want
my kids to be happy. What's really interesting is that when you're out in
the world and you're seeking pleasure, and by the way, all the social
science data backs all of this up, when you're seeking happiness for the sake
of happiness, and when you are not following eternal truths, when you don't
know the difference between vice and virtue, and when you are going along with
all of the new ideas in the world which are not rooted in truth,
it actually does not make you happy. You know what neat is The saints
in this book all exhibited this inner piece so even when they knew that their
lives were in danger. So we were just talking about Father Yerji Papishko.
He's a great example. His friends were telling him to go seek safety at
the Vatican. But that wasn't his plan, that wasn't God's plan for his
life, and he knew that, and so they were advising him to go
seek safety. He had been arrested something like fifteen times and harassed, and
they planted the communist planted evidence in his apartment, and they slanted him in
the press and told him and called him an agitator, and that he was
presiding over these hate meetings that were at hate By the way, we think
it's so new now, but this is a tactic that has been used by
leftists trying to edge out religious people and conservatives and people who want to put
the interests of their families over the interests of the state. This is a
tactic that his and used just time and time again. So this is nothing
new. But Yearsy had this inner piece, you know, just like Mother
Teresa had this inner piece, and Saint Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio had this
inner piece. And we look at their stories and we think, you know,
could I have been as courageous as they were. I was gonna say,
what's interesting about Father Yersey is that comes from Colby. Yes, And
that's the sort of it's kind of meta reading the book and especially realizing it's
directed at children like Father Yersley was himself when he came across Colby. That's
right, that this can be perhaps an introduction in the same way like Colby
was for Jersey. Yes. Well, And it's funny because it actually occurred
to me that there were very there were different ways that I could have structured
the book, you know, and one way was, you know, starting
with some of the earliest saints, like you know, Saint Margaret of Antioch
and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and then just going through Joan of arc who
inspired Saint Chrez who's in the last chapter with Mother Teresa, and then going
on to Mother Teresa because yes, you know, the final stories that are
in here will be written in another book about inspiring the saints that we are
going to see into the future. Yeah, that the inner peace I found
very resonant in the chapter on Father Jersey and Maximilian Colby. And what do
you think it was about Colby that we I mean, you're probably going to
say the interpeace. Actually that makes sense, but that gave so much comfort
to Father Jersey, and how can people be looking for that now? I
just found that chapter be very moving and resonant. It's truth, you know,
it's all truth. You know, YERSI was a courageous truth teller because
he knew what he was doing was spreading truth to people who had been denied
it. You know, these were people who were living under an atheistic government
that was trying to just distort the reality that they should be loyal to a
government before they are loyal to God. You know, we have rights as
human beings made in the image and likeness of God that are foundational. Government
cannot take away those rights. And it is not government that grants us those
natural light rights. Those rights come from God. You's not so Protestant right
now. Well, in response to that comment, I would like to point
out that another I think another part of this book that I was actually very
pleased to be able to highlight is that time and time again, the Catholic
Church in response to socialism and communism and fascism and all of these other you
know, new systems that emerge that are rooted in lies. Time and time
again, the Church has made very bold statements bringing it all back to the
truth that is written on our hearts. So is the truth that is written
on our hearts. And that is why when Father Yergi was giving these homilies,
and you know, twenty thousand people would show up to hear his homilies
live, which is just so spectacular to me under communism. Under communism,
including non Catholics, by the way, and non Catholics were interviewed and they
would say, I came to hear the truth spoken unfiltered, and hearing the
truth allowed me to recognize the lies, you know, by the way.
One thing I want to point out, since he just mentioned Maximilian Colby,
is Saint Maximilian Colby was this you know, media and was a media star.
But he was this media entrepreneur, you know, and he had this
wonderful newspaper called Knights of the Immaculata which reached reached a circulation of one million.
God that printing press, which oh my, I'm having so much fun.
But this was also an inspiration for Father Yergiet because twenty thousand people came
to hear his homilies in person, but millions more actually got to listen to
his messages because his friends would record his homilies and they would play them on
Radio Free Europe, which would be broadcast throughout the Eastern Bloc and throughout the
world. But they would also reprint his words in underground newspapers. So these
were both men that understood the power of truth telling, you know, and
that is something that in our culture today. You know, I have heard
even well meaning Christians and well meaning Conservatives give young people the advice that they
should keep their heads down, just get through school, just get the good
grades. I cannot think of worse, more soul and endangering advice than to
tell a young people to develop a habit of cowardice, because we develop these
habits as young people, and a young person who chooses cowardice and tries to
mask it as prudence is going to be an adult who is not going to
make those hard decisions and are not is not going to be truthful in the
world and spread truth the way that father Maximilian Colby did and the way that
father and Yorg Poppy should go did. That's incredible. I haven't thought about
that before. That's I feel very almost condemned right now. I don't know
if I've given anyone that advice, but so you hear it. You do
hear it all the time. It's everywhere. So actually, I'm so glad
you mentioned that because the Catholic Church right now is playing a really fascinating role
and something I wanted to talk to you about, which is this h some
people in this this high tech world are more and more I guess in two
camps. One is a camp where the supernatural seems totally uh silly, right
like it's this is this is We've we've solved this, this is all foolish,
et cetera, et cetera. On the other hand, the last time
Raymond Roy was on the show, we were talking about the trad cath explosion
in places like New York City, where there's almost an underground hipster edge to
Latin mass for instance. And I think what you were just talking about,
in terms of truth being more seductive than anything when you're living in a hostile
culture, is completely fascinating, and it's an incredible recruitment tool for the Catholic
Church, which has in so many ways remained unmoved esthetically, especially by the
culture throughout the centuries. And I wanted to ask you about that because you
write in a way when it comes to you were writing about our Lady of
Guadalupe in the story of Saint Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio, really interesting chapter
by the when Mexican Catholicism is fascinating no matter what, you don't have to
do much to make it fascinating. But for children, the supernat is kind
of obvious, right, like that's the child's mind. For adults right now,
I think there are a lot of people for whom these stories are incredibly
powerful because it's something that feels opposed to this high tech, anti truth world,
and it feels different. Can you talk a little bit about that.
It feels a little rebellious. Yes, it is. It is different.
But you know, scientism has been really damaging to Christianity over the last several
decades centuries. Actually, this idea that we can only know what we can
prove through the scientific method is so obviously on its face false, And I
think that what stories about the supernatural do. What attending a traditional Latin mass
that feels very spiritual, that is very focused on this the spiritual realities that
cannot be measured using only your eyesight, losing using scientific instruments. We know
that there is more. It is intuitive, you know, even just looking
at some of the most important issues that we debate on a day to day
basis basis. You know, look at the issue of morality. You know,
what is right, what is wrong? What is a virtue, what
is advice? You know, these have been flipped on their head, but
you can't use the scientific method to determine these things, and yet we are
talking about them every single day. So I think what happens is when you
start to encounter some of these stories, so for example, like our Lady
of Guadalupe appearing to Saint Juan Diego, you know, you start to realize
that, you know, there is something more that has driven history, you
know, through the ages. And you look at the way that Mexico was
converted almost immediately and almost completely after the appearance of our Lady of Guadalupe to
Saint Juan Diego, and you realize that that these phenomena cannot be cannot be
explained against purely by observation and purely through the scientific method. So what it
does is it is it reveals a greater truth, a greater truth that we
all know is there, we all sense is there, and it feels really
good to admit it when embrace embrace it, Embrace it and admit it to
people when when you know that they are going to be accusing you of being
a simpleton and relying on your blind faith, but when you feel that you
have discovered something that the rest of the world is turning a blind eye too.
Some of them, I think purposefully. Others are just going along with
the crowd right. Others just have not been in a position to be taught,
I think, to be thinking through matters in a very sophisticated way.
There's a lot of distraction in our world today. The kind of education that
we are giving young people is one that does not cultivate a sense of wonder
curiosity about the world. It is one that is designed to produce compliance,
citizens who do what they are told. And so again, talking about these
habits that you develop as a child, you know, the habit of asking
questions and the habit of pursuing truth is one that you really need to cultivate
as a very young age because what happens when you just give children the direction
of get a good grade, go on to the next level, go to
college, get a job, watch Netflix, spend and it's gracious. I
don't know how many hours teenagers and young adults are spending on their phones these
days. They're they're not reading stories like the stories in this book, and
what it's doing is really just numbing them to this natural wonder that you know
is in all of us that really needs to be cultivated. And just that
the picture you just painted makes so much sense when you think of the story
of for instance, Father, you're see why those people, some of those
people would then in this very gray world, would then flock to hear him
speak in the thousands, or would be tuning in the radio by the thousands,
Because again, when you're in that kind of culture, there's something so
intoxicating in the contrast either, you know, for some peoples just like well,
this, this contrast with this the scientific world and the supernatural just obviously
condemns the supernatural, makes the supernatural look crazy. For other people, the
contrast pulls them to the side of true. I think because in young people,
I want to ask you about this again, you spend a lot of
time thinking about this. I have seen in the last five years, maybe
since COVID. You know, when Little Nassas is out with Satan outward images
of the demonic being romanticized and I think championed by people in popular culture in
ways that we haven't seen quite so explicit for some time. A little bit
of time that is converting people. That feels so real and the embrace of
the ugly and the evil. I have seen young people react to that in
ways that I would never have imagined. How So, it feels very obvious
that something is something is very very wrong, that the culture has gone awry.
And then it seems to me that people turn towards not everybody, but
it seems to me there's a chunk of people that are living very secular lives
and are sort of it's a it's a it's an alarm when you see something
like that, it's an alarm that kind of shakes you out of it and
pushes you to sort of reconsider everything. It's like the gateway. Well,
we are physical beings and we are spiritual beings. And again, just because
you can't see something again, to go back to the issue of morality,
just because you can't see morality doesn't mean that morality does not exist. And
just because you cannot see Satan and you can't see the demons working in the
world, and you can't see God's angels working in the world, does not
mean that they are not there. And I think that over the last few
years there has been a greater appreciation for the spiritual aspect of our lives,
the real spiritual aspect of our lives that is there every single day. We
are spiritual beings, we are physical beings. And there has been a fascination
with the devil on both sides, you know, both by those in secular
society who I think are longing for, you know, a spirituality longing for
purpose. You know, That's another thing is when you're seeking happiness but you're
doing so through pleasure and you're not doing so through truth, You're still going
to be there. There's something just in the human condition. You know,
we are always looking for God. But when you're looking for God without an
understanding of truth and goodness and beauty, you're going to be seeking and finding
something that is going to feed something in you and that is going to give
you some kind of of a purpose that maybe you're lacking. But it doesn't
mean that it's good, you know, and it very much can be rooted
in the supernatural and rooted in evil. But there's also been a fast fascination
by the way, among Christians about evil in recent years. We've seen all
sorts of movies and books and podcasts you know, taking off on you know,
really exploring the demonic and the actions of the demonic and her everyday lives.
And again, I think that this is a reaction to just this denial
of reality that has always existed, and yet for a long time we pretended
that if we can't see it and we can't measure it them, then it
doesn't exist. You can't find purpose without truth, and there's no more obvious
or gateway to truth than the supernatural. You know. It's something that completely
makes everything else melt away. Interesting. Yeah, and you know, it's
like you see it in astrology too, the secular interest in astrology, which
is just exploding and taking off on TikTok. It's everywhere. The interest in
astrology is like on another level. Right, it's interesting. I didn't know
that. How do you know that about TikTok? Are you on TikTok?
I'm not on TikTok. I promise you I'm not on TikTok, but I
didn't want to disappoint camp really, but it is. I mean, there
are some people have written pieces about it, but you can it's you see
it everywhere too. I mean, there are totally normal podcasts influencers whoever they
are, that seem they're very popular people. Whatever it is that they're constantly
talking about astrology. The cultural interest in astrology is like taking off. And
again, I think it is because when you live in this world which is
telling you, is it making you miserable because you lack purpose. It feels
like if you can connect with something outside of the world that you're in,
which is which is feeding this, I can understand why that would be kind
of intoxicating too. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm glad that you mentioned the
influencers because I recently read that about the influence of pure influencers to teenagers.
Now, my kids do not have smartphones, and they have gab phones,
which are their dumb phones. I guess they're for kids and old people gap
phone. So we have gab phones for our three teenagers and they can text
on them and they can call people. They can even text photos. They
can take pictures, but they do not have social media access. My kids
do not have social media accounts and they don't have Internet access. That's yeah,
it seems again so obvious, but I think growing up, so I
was born in nineteen ninety three, and that seems completely obvious to me,
but I think parents, it took a while there was a learning curve for
people to realize exactly how evil and horrible some of this technology was well and
how how influential the influencers are influencers are. Yeah, you know, that
has been very jarring to me to discover that we have teenagers who you know,
have parents who are living in the same home as their parents, who
are going to school, who have teachers, who have coaches. But you
know, the data is showing that who they're looking to to shape their ideas
are people their own age who have large social media followings. You know.
Again, I think that this is why focusing on heroes and passing down the
stories of heroes are important, because everybody looks up to somebody, you know,
and you know, we used to when we had stronger families, we
would pass down the stories of our families through generations. And we would,
you know, tell the stories of our great grandparents and they would be a
part of our identity. And with the breakdown of the family, we've largely
lost that. So, you know, kids are growing up in all sorts
of different family situations. They're not having these stories passed down to them.
They don't have religion, a lot of them are not going to church.
But when you start to introduce some of the stories of some of the courageous
people who have existed in history before us, it does give you somebody to
look up to and somebody to start kind of comparing your life to theirs and
how they dealt with the challenges, you know, how they navigated through the
complexities of their worlds. Is the Church doing a good enough job promoting these
stories? I think a much better job than we used to be. So
there's been a really wonderful trend over the last few years in liturgical living.
Is this something you're familiar with, so as you have some you know again
Catholic influencers, but I know a lot of them have done, you know,
a really wonderful and beautiful job for the church in highlighting wonderful feast days
you can celebrate in your homes different ways that you can, you know,
be bringing traditional Catholic music and cultural music into your homes to celebrate the lives
of some of these saints. And it's been I think, really it's been
a good thing for a lot of reasons. You know. For one,
because the lives of the saints are so they are so inspirational, and they
are a part of what it means to be Catholic to have these these stories
before you. But it also it's just it's fun, you know, it's
fun to build a culture in your home that is based on you know,
excitement, you know, these wonderful stories and these amazing personalities you know of
the people who have come before us. So I think it's been good for
a lot of reasons. You know, we mentioned phones earlier, and some
homes have gone completely digital. I've actually been in a lot of homes recently
where there are no books. Have you experienced this? Go out West in
California. There are a lot of homes without books because everything has gone digital
now, and I think physical books are really important. So that's the other
thing that you're probably realizing that I'm getting to now is the importance of a
home library and having physical books that your kids can actually, you know,
pop off the shelf look through. I hear that the Barnes and Noble that
we just had here and rest and is coming back. Did you hear that?
I didn't know, very exciting. We went to Amazon very very quickly,
and where you just click a button and the book arrives. But we've
lost that ability to take a book off the shelf and look through it.
And whereas I think some bookstores are going to be returning because there's a desire
for that, there's no reason that families can't do this on their own in
their home, you know. And they should start collecting books for their kids,
you know. Really, as soon as you're married, as soon as
you start having children, you should start putting books on your bookshelves that your
kids can take down and flip through and read a portion here, read a
portion there, revisit it as they want to. I recently found a book
that I had read, oh, I don't know, maybe ten years ago,
and I was thinking about this one particular part of the book, and
I was so happy that I find it on my bookshelf and be able to
find the exact place in the book where it was, and I read before
it, and I read after. I ended up sitting down and just finding
myself because the second time you read a book is never the same as the
first time you read it, because you have all those experiences that have happened
in the meantime. So I think that's you know. There was another motivation
for writing the book was to help families build a culture in their homes that
includes a family library. I love that, and again, it's putting words
to paper that it's enduring and nobody can change it. They can reprint another
copy, but they can't change the original. They can destroy it physically if
they want to. But when you I'm a pretty avid Kindle user, but
I don't like it's not ideal. I try to buy as many hard copy
books as I possibly can. Because you don't own a Kindle book, someone
could. Let's say you get on the wrong side of Amazon, Kimberly and
I have a Kindle download. They can wipe that off your device. The
same thing with music, same thing with TV and movies. What is it
about flipping through a book you think is particularly important for children? I wanted
to ask you that question as you were talking because seems like there's something you
think for kids about picking up of a physical copy of the book and then
physically moving through the space of the book. That's important. You can flip
back very easily, so I do this whenever I read. In fact,
there's an index you probably noticed in the book. I was very very adamant
that I wanted an index, and I was told that's great, if you
can do the index yourself. It took me about a week to do the
index. But I love indexes because inevitably I will get to a point in
the book and I'll think, oh goodness, I want to go back to
that part, and it is very easy then to go to the index and
to find we know where a particular part of a book has a topic,
or a person or a place has been mentioned. Because books are not meant
to just be read in one sitting and then to be forgotten, you know.
And I think when you read something on a kindle, it's just too
hard. It's just too much work to go back and to try to find
whatever it is that you've read before. There is something about actually flipping through.
There's no sense of space on a kindle. There's no physical space right
well, and the other things numbers that. I think beauty is important and
books are beautiful. You know. I love hardcover books, and I was
so pleased because Tan created this beautiful cover more the book, which I think
is just absolutely beautiful at Saint john Vard looking up to the heavens, and
I think actually having a book that is beautiful and sitting on a couch and
just kind of flipping through the pages is just a wonderful way to spend an
afternoon. Before we wrap, I want to return actually to the stories in
the book with one question about the twentieth century. And obviously we've talked about
communism and Father yoursy, We've talked about Saint Theresa a little bit. But
the scientism then sort of communism, Nietzcheism of the twentieth century. How did
that And I asked this question because I think it might resonate with people in
twenty twenty three. How did that culture make them shape them to be such
incredible leaders for the faith? Well, I think that anytime we are encountering
dark times, you are going to see some of the brightest lights shining out
there for truth. And I think that you know, all of the individuals
who are in the book are those who had a very strong devotion to truth,
devotion to the faith very early on, and so they had a very
very strong sense of right and wrong and in the proper role, you know,
especially the chapters that are about just very offensive, tyrannical governments, gross
abuses of power, there's a very strong sense that the role of the government
per Christianity through the ages is to protect the god given rights of individuals and
families. And so I think a lot of it was a sense of justice
on the part of the heroes in the book, because when they're confronted with
with with such with such evil, and a real attempt by the powers that
be to silence the truth tellers, you know, I think their their sense
of purpose became all the more obvious. And there was such a you know,
such a difference between what the authorities were doing and what the truth tellers
were doing, and there was such a stark contrast that I think that you
know, it did enable their message to really resonate with those around them.
Okay, actually one more question. We are so isolated from death in our
culture, especially children, thinking of the ways that affects children and that's a
huge theme of this book, Martyrdom, the looming fear of death that actually
sort of counterintuitively was because death was so much more present and prior cultures,
before modern technology, there was sort of more more comfort with death maybe,
And again it's it's kind of intuitive, and a lot of people have written
whole books on this. But when you're when you're writing a book like this
for children and the importance of life and death and heaven and earth is central
to these stories, how on earth do you make that accessible and almost comforting
to children in the way it needs to come through in these stories. Well,
it is comforting, you know, you know, the idea that again
we are we are made for a particular purpose, you know, to know
and to love and to serve God and to do his will here on earth
and then to spend eternity with Him in heaven. That's all part of the
plan, you know. And when we don't talk about the death, and
we don't talk about you know, the journey, you know, the divide
between heaven and earth, and we don't talk about you know, as Catholics,
we believe that there are saints in heaven who intercede for us that we
can pray to who pray for us, to Christ. You know, when
we leave that all out of the experience of childhood, that's very confusing,
you know. I actually think it's more companying for a child to be more
familiar with these stories of martyrtom and death, you know, and in crossing
that divide, so that we know that the Saints are there to pray to
them, and so that they can intercede for us and we can all be,
you know, praying together to God, and that that there is more
of a comfort in recognizing that all of that is true, that all of
that is real, and that it all gives us purpose in our lives.
Can really this was such a treat I hope the listeners now understand why I
admire you as much as I do. This was wonderful. The book is
wonderful again. It's called Unbreakable Saints who inspired Saints to moral courage, super
readable. Whether you're an adult or your child, Congratulations on this book,
Kimberly, Thank you. Emily Kimberly once again is a is the editor of
Catholic School Playbook. She is also the project advisor for Run with Saints and
a board member of Young America's Foundation, and again, go out get this
book. You won't regret it. Great investment. I'm emilitacian skate culture editor
here at the Federalist. You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray.