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.

A failed sales lead, two Amazon routes, one minute at home, and less than a gallon of gas. On Labor Day weekend, ordinary work became the place where grief, formation, and a new vocation caught fire.

A salesman learning to read homes encounters St. Maximus the Confessor—and discovers Scripture, creation, and ordinary life as books that require attention, purification, and grace.

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

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.

I learned to read books long before I learned to read a room. Sales is teaching me to attend to the language of every home and to the people waiting for my attention in my own.

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.

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.

Hardship is what happens to us. Podvig is how we faithfully respond. A clarification of what “Choose Hard” does and does not mean.

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.

One year after beginning a job I never expected, I reflect on rejection, failure, unfinished struggle—and what repeatedly choosing hard is making of me.

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.