I title this series of conversations with young people The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. I met each person in this series while teaching at Newman Theological College in Edmonton from 2020, during the pandemic, through the Fall of 2023. Newman had just introduced a new degree and moved its curriculum into a great books and Socratic dialogue model.

I am joined by Victor Carpay in this podcast. I never had the pleasure of having Victor in one of the classes I was privileged to teach. We talked periodically in the atrium of Newman, and I glimpsed how the study of the great books, the Socratic method, the Newman community, and the liturgical life were at work in nurturing his mind and heart. Victor is likely the most precocious businessman I have ever met. He also began engaging party politics as a young boy, an experience completely foreign to me. 

You will hear Victor speak about how his Newman education, his professors Drs Topping and Fast, initiated him to reading the great books, taught him to enter the author’s mind, appreciate the questions and problems each author wrestled with. Each of these great books, whether it was the Iliad, Plato and Aristotle, Boethius and Aquinas through to Nietzsche and Marx have touched his mind and prepared him for engaging others including those he may not immediately understand.  

The Socratic method so finely taught at Newman has reshaped his political understanding. As a young passionate conservative, he has come to realize, as Aristotle taught, that friendship is central to the political life in a civil society. Once you can find something mutually cared for and cared for across party lines politics begins.     

Welcome to our conversation.