The Academy I Didn't Know I Was Building

Erin Doom

Oct 4

8 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

A Guide Through the City of Podvig

Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Hierotheus, Bishop of Athens

Commemoration of the Holy Martyr Domnina with Her Daughters of Syria

Anno Domini 2026, October 1

The rooms were being gathered long before the city had a name.

The Dream in Colombia

ALMOST thirty years ago, I was a twenty-two-year-old missionary in Colombia. Just a couple of blocks from the church where I worked, a large mural reminded me daily how unwelcome I was in a country then ravaged by cartels and the cocaine trade:

“For the sovereignty of Colombia, get out, gringos!”

It was in that same time and place that I began dreaming about a gap-year program.

I imagined a year set apart for Christian formation: serious study of the Bible, the Fathers, and the great books of Western civilization; prayer and worship; poetry, language, astronomy, craftsmanship, ministry, and the practical arts of living well. I didn't want education to mean the transfer of information from one mind to another. I wanted young people to acquire a way of seeing that would shape a way of life.

That dream became the foundation for a project I eventually began describing as a Catechetical Academy.

The Shape of the Academy

I recently found an old letter that showed me how much of the vision was already present. In 2007, I wrote to Wendell Berry inviting him to address the students of June School, a week-long summer retreat created by the Saint John of Damascus Institute and Northfield School of the Liberal Arts. I described its heart as “spiritual formation, intellectual study, manual work, and leisure.” The students would hike and camp, live in a rural cabin in Dogwood Mudhole, TN, and conclude the week on the university campus at Sewanee. Their days would be ordered by prayer. Mornings would be devoted to the Bible, the early Church Fathers, and Western civilization. Afternoons would join manual work—building a church, working with an Amish community, and organic farming—to reading, reflection, discussion, writing, and art. Evenings would turn toward music, story telling, and astronomy.

The letter named the losses we hoped to answer: the loss of the sacred, of wonder, of place and community, of feasting and fasting, of meaningful work and true leisure, of the great conversation, and of a living connection to the Christian and Western inheritance. I told Berry that we hoped to give young people what Jean Leclercq called the love of learning and the desire for God.

Reading that letter now is almost unsettling. Long before Podvig had a name, its elements were already gathered there: body, mind, and soul; books and practices; fasting and feasting; work and contemplation; the Fathers and the classics; the land, the arts, the heavens, and the formation of a human person.

The academy was never merely going to be a school about Christianity. It was meant to help people receive the Christian inheritance as something living: Scripture read within the Church, the Fathers encountered as guides rather than museum pieces, the classical tradition recovered as a conversation about what it means to be human, and practices capable of carrying truth from the page into the body.

For years, I thought I knew what form the dream was supposed to take. There would be students, teachers, courses, and a defined curriculum. Perhaps there would be two long paths of study: one devoted explicitly to Christian formation—Scripture, Creed, sacraments, prayer, virtue, and liturgy—and another devoted to the recovery of the Western tradition through its persons, texts, arts, and governing themes. The Catechetical Academy would gather these disciplines into a coherent whole.

The Dream That Survived

Then life kept moving. The Saint John of Damascus Institute became Eighth Day Institute. Conferences, lectures, publications, friendships, feasts, and conversations gathered around the same underlying desire. I pursued doctoral work at Durham because the first board believed the academy would need a deeper intellectual foundation. The dissertation became a study of Charles Taylor, Georges Florovsky, secularism, tradition, and the Church’s creative witness in the modern world.

The dissertation remained unfinished. That unfinished work has now become The Long Conclusion, a public attempt to complete the work and to tell the truth about failure, delay, and beginning again. The academy never appeared in the form I had imagined. Eventually I left the institution I had spent nearly twenty years building.

It would be easy to describe the original dream as something that failed.

Dreams sometimes survive by surrendering the form in which we first recognized them.

I'm only now beginning to see that the Catechetical Academy did not disappear. Its materials were being gathered all along: in books and lectures, commonplace entries and correspondence, person folders and theme folders, icon studies and patristic texts, conversations around tables, physical practices, songs heard in the car, failures endured, and questions that refused to leave me alone.

Now those materials are becoming Podvig.

Catechesis by Pilgrimage

Podvig is not called the Catechetical Academy. It's not a gap year. It doesn't begin in a classroom or follow a prescribed sequence of courses. But it is catechesis.

Catechesis by pilgrimage.

A person may enter because an icon has captured his attention. He wants to know what he is seeing, so he enters the Icon Room and begins to learn how to read it. But an icon can't be followed very far without encountering the Incarnation, matter transfigured by grace, the communion of saints, worship, and the Church.

Someone else enters through the Listening Room. A song gives language to grief, fidelity, repentance, despair, or hope. The listener follows that experience into a reflection, then into the life of a saint, a word from the Fathers, or a practice of attention and prayer.

Another person enters through a book review, a marriage reflection, a sales encounter, a commonplace quotation, an exercise for the body, or an actual letter arriving in the mail.

None of these are bait. Each room is real. Each offers something worth receiving in itself. But every room has doors.

Follow the Gymnasium deeply enough and the body ceases to be an accessory or a private construction. It becomes something received, disciplined, healed, and offered. Follow the Desert and a compelling idea becomes a practice repeated until it begins to shape a person. Follow the Bibliotheka, the collection of public writings, and one essay opens onto a person, a tradition, and a conversation much larger than itself. Follow the Commonplace and apparently scattered fragments begin disclosing a whole.

This is catechesis governed by attention and desire rather than imposed by a syllabus.

The movement may appear meandering, but the meandering is part of the pedagogy. It's how I've learned: through correspondence and recurrence, by placing one passage beside another, by hearing an old doctrine illuminated by a new song, by discovering that a physical practice clarifies a spiritual truth, and by returning years later to something copied into a notebook without knowing why it mattered.

A City with Many Entrances

Podvig gives that way of learning an architecture. I first imagined it as a school. Then I began speaking of a house with many rooms. What is emerging is larger: a city.

The homepage is its gate and map. Three modes of formation run through the city: the Commonplace, the Desert, and the Gymnasium. The Commonplace is the work of the mind: recovering the inheritance of books, persons, ideas, history, and art, and placing them into relation until a larger whole begins to appear. The Desert is the formation of the soul through prayer, repentance, Scripture, liturgy, and the wisdom of the fathers and mothers of the Church. The Gymnasium is the formation of the body through strength, endurance, nutrition, fasting, health, and disciplined work. None is subordinate to the others. Together they form one life.

Throughout the city stand houses, workshops, gardens, gathering places, and chambers. Some have already opened; others exist only in blueprints or are still under construction. Together they include the Listening Room, the Icon Room, the Workshop, the Garden, the Forge, the Table, the Synprosopon and Syntopikon—the collections devoted to persons and themes—and the monthly rooms prepared around the guide or theme introduced in each physical Letter.

The Commonplace Letter gathers all three modes of formation into one monthly journey. It's an invitation delivered beyond the walls. It does not attempt to contain the city. It tells the recipient that something has been prepared and provides a way in. Letter No. 0, for example, leads into the Irenaeus Room: one furnished room in which an icon, a saint, Scripture, patristic wisdom, books, practices, and questions are placed in illuminating relation.

The Palace at the Center

At the center stands the Members’ Library. It is the palace, not because it governs the other quarters, but because it's the central, many-roomed place where the collected treasures, complete archives, guided journeys, persons, themes, courses, and connections are gathered. A visitor may enter Podvig through a single song, essay, or icon. The Members’ Library allows that visitor to discover the larger inheritance to which the first encounter belongs.

These are not miscellaneous content categories given picturesque names. They are different entrances into one coherent vision of the human person. They ask the same question:

Who are you becoming?

And they move according to the same rhythm:

Behold. Practice. Become.

The monthly path still matters. A traveler can wander, but he should not always have to find his way alone. The Letter opens a theme. The companion page leads farther. The Members’ Library supplies context, sequence, and connection. A course can gather one room into sustained study. The architecture allows freedom without abandoning guidance.

The City Faces Outward

The metaphor requires a theological boundary.

The Church is not another room in Podvig, nor is the Kingdom one more district waiting to be built.

Podvig must never become a self-contained spiritual world or a substitute for ecclesial life. The whole city should face outward toward the Church and the Kingdom. Its purpose is preparation, attention, and formation: helping people learn to behold what is real, practice what is true, and become capable of receiving a life that Podvig itself cannot give.

This may be more capable of fulfilling the original dream than the institution I once imagined. A gap-year program would have served a small cohort in one place for one year. Podvig can meet people almost anywhere in life, anywhere in the world, and accompany them for as long as they wish to keep walking. Someone who would never enroll in a catechetical program may nevertheless enter because of Rich Mullins, Irenaeus, an icon of the Transfiguration, a difficult marriage, a wounded body, or a letter worth keeping.

Orthodoxy is not Podvig’s market niche. It is the ground from which Podvig has grown and continues to develop. The aim is not to conceal that ground but to create hospitable doorways into it, allowing a person to encounter its vision of God, creation, the human person, suffering, communion, and transfiguration before possessing all the vocabulary.

Where the Roads Converge

It also helps me understand the long road more truthfully.

Colombia gave me the dream of a gap-year program. The Catechetical Academy gave the dream an intellectual form. Eighth Day Books and Eighth Day Institute gathered the books, persons, traditions, and conversations. The dissertation forced me to ask how the inheritance of the Church could be received and inhabited within a secular age. The years of unfinished work, ordinary labor, injury, marriage, selling water, delivering packages, writing letters, and beginning again have tested whether any of those ideas could become a form of life.

Podvig is not simply the next project in that sequence. It's the place where the roads are converging.

I thought I was supposed to build the Catechetical Academy as a program.