A Sam Barber song, a picture at home, and a reflection on flight, fidelity, and the road that teaches us how to return.

After writing about why I am building Podvig, I discovered a two-day diptych in the Church calendar: St. Cosmas and St. Lucian.

When I asked my wife whether finishing my dissertation still mattered, her answer was immediate. Twenty years of unfinished work had become more than an academic question.

Long before Podvig, Dr. Anthony Gythiel taught me to gather flowers from books. This essay traces the florilegium and the monastic century—and why Podvig is recovering them as practices of attention, memory, and becoming.

Building a website and running an ultramarathon require the same discipline: stop trying to carry the whole mountain and take the next faithful step.

The Work of a Curator and Why I Am Building the Podvig Members' Library

Twenty years after beginning doctoral work, I am returning to its unfinished conclusion. Eight reflections will explore failure, formation, and the question connecting the dissertation to Podvig: How does truth become a form of life?

A dream born in Colombia, carried through the Catechetical Academy, Eighth Day Institute, Durham, and years of ordinary labor, is finally taking form in Podvig.

Warren Farha called Amazon “The Jungle.” This is an essay about independent bookstores, household budgets, and getting a worthy book into someone’s hands.

A personal library is not a record of everything we’ve completed. It is a place of return: unread questions, marked memories, and books waiting for the work still ahead.

An Amazon delivery route brought back a boyhood paper route, years of carrying books, and a question I had never quite asked: what has delivery been teaching me?

What makes a song worth carrying into the Listening Room? Through Rich Mullins’s “Elijah,” Gregory Wolfe’s question, and Simone Weil’s practice of attention, we ask not merely whether music moves us, but where it moves us.

Rich Mullins was supposed to play “Creed” at our wedding. After his death, his hammered dulcimer—and the faith his song confessed—still found its way into the beginning of our marriage.

Rich Mullins’s “When You Love” helps clarify what Choose Hard really means: difficulty is not the goal. Love is—and love sometimes takes the steeper road.

A family print shop, a hidden inheritance, and the story of how Podvig Press found roots in work carried forward across generations.

The three words at the heart of Podvig.

We live amid an abundance of words and a poverty of attention. A commonplace book offers a small act of resistance: a place to gather what matters and allow it to shape the way we live.

St. Irenaeus unfolds the parallel between Eve and Mary—and shows how the knot of disobedience was loosed through faithful obedience.

The heart receives a song. Life threatens to bury it. We sing it again. An early Listening Room manifesto shaped by Rich Mullins and the practice of praise.

Before Irenaeus was a bishop, theologian, missionary, or author, he was a boy who listened...and learned to receive and hand on the apostolic faith.