The joy of "being known here" is not just for the students. When a faculty cultivates friendship, it benefits the entire school community.

Tom Cox has been a middle and upper school Latin and Greek teacher at The Heights since 2009. Tom also hosts The Forum Faculty Podcast, now in its second year, which gives a slice of teacher breakroom culture: the kinds of conversations, rapport, and friendship that are born of our shared work and life as teachers. Tom joins us today to talk about how important faculty friendship is to making a school into a community, and what schools can do to support the planned and unplanned interactions that feed friendship.

1:53 Tom Cox's history at The Heights

6:35 School as a community of friends

10:15 Using school trips for faculty bonding

14:58 Regional schools: community or society

17:01 Creating community over large distances

26:53 Building up faculty friendship

36:04 Friendship requires shared life, work

38:57 Facilitating that shared life

47:09 Planned and unplanned interactions

50:49 Real communities pass on a culture

57:26 The fruit of staying in one place

"A Faculty of Friends" from Gregory the Great Academy in Elmhurst Township, Pennsylvania

Plutarch Podcast by Tom Cox

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Man and the State by Jacques Maritain

The World-Ending Fire Collection by Wendell Berry

True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness by John Cuddeback

"Charles" by Shirley Jackson

"The Work of Local Culture" in What Are People For? by Wendell Berry

The Forum Faculty Podcast hosted by Tom Cox

Friendship and the 21st-Century Boy featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Friendship for Fathers featuring John Cuddeback

On Friendship after Senior Year featuring David Maxham

Fathers' Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025)

The Art of Teaching Boys Conference at The Heights School (January 7-9, 2026 / May 6-8, 2026)

What are parental rights? Are they a legal stance—or a philosophical one?

In today's conversation, Dr. Melissa Moschella of the University of Notre Dame discusses the profound and practical implications of the parent-child relationship. She then explores how those conclusions operate in the American legal tradition, tracing from natural law to John Locke to historic court cases and the public discourse today.

3:46 True rights imply true duties

10:04 Natural law: knowable through reason

15:00 The rights and duties of parents

22:32 Role of the state in the American tradition

28:44 Twentieth-century shift, John Rawls

37:29 Whether schools can be value-neutral

43:34 Parental rights in American courts

46:47 Beyond religious liberty

55:00 School choice as parental choice

1:00:57 Public discourse: how to talk to friends, family, neighbors

1:05:30 Her book on natural law

Melissa Moschella, Ph.D., McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame

To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by Melissa Moschella

Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing by Melissa Moschella

Democratic Education by Amy Guttman (argued against by Dr. Moschella)

Brief of Amica Curiae in Support of Petitioners by Melissa Moschella

"Nonreligious Parents Have Rights Too," WSJ op-ed by Melissa Moschella

The Mortara Case: Parental Authority and Thomas Aquinas featuring Dr. Matthew Tapie and Dr. Lionel Yaceczko

Parents as Primary Educators by Michael Moynihan

Fathers' Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025)

The Art of Teaching Boys Conference at The Heights School (January 7-9, 2026 / May 6-8, 2026)

There should be no contradiction in pursuing hard sciences, humanities, and moral virtue all in one day.

For upper schoolers switching classrooms every hour, or for teachers siloed in a single subject, it can be easy to mistake "education" for a series of distinct academic categories. In this rebroadcast from 2015, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan gives us a better framework. He urges us to look at how our school's different departments present a unified and infinitively connective worldview—one that invites inquisitive engagement and exercises the full scope of human reason.

4:39 The strength of "entertainment culture"

8:16 Successful families

9:28 Assessing the educational landscape

11:32 Fragmented school subjects

14:20 Teaching persons, not subjects

17:18 Appreciating the full scope of human reason

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton (see chapter 8, "The Romance of Orthodoxy")

By the Communion of Persons Man Becomes the Image of God by Pope St. John Paul II

The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI

Laudato Si by Pope Francis

The Art of Teaching Sovereign Knowers by Michael Moynihan

Fall Open House at The Heights School (October 18, 2025)

Fathers' Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025)

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)