The Mojo Book Academy: Building a Flourishing Life--Let Us Begin

Welcome And A Change Ahead

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another mojo minute. And something is changing here. And we want to tell it, we want to tell it to you directly, honestly, and with the excitement that we genuinely feel about what is coming.

Announcing Mojo Book Academy

SPEAKER_01 0:45

For the past five years, this podcast and this community has lived under the name the Team Mojo Academy. That name served its purpose. It let the right people gather. It built an early foundation, exploring all the books, or most of the books, rather. But as we have grown in our thinking and our mission in the times in which we live, and in our clarity about what we are actually trying to do, we have come to understand that the name needs to grow too. So effective immediately, and you've probably already seen this on some of the socials, but we are now called the Mojo Book Academy. That's just not a rebrand, it's a declaration.

Why The Name Had To Grow

SPEAKER_01 1:32

So let's talk about why the change. The Teen Mojo Academy was the starting point. It was a gathering place. It said come together without yet saying towards what. The Mojo Book Academy says something more specific and it's more honest about what this community has always been at its best. A community of men and women who, primarily men, who believe that the books matter, that the tradition they carry is worth recovering, and that the path to genuinely flourishing in life runs through the great ideas that built Western civilization. I know that's countercultural. That's not well accepted in our times, but that's where we are

Books As Real Formation

SPEAKER_01 2:19

at. The book in the name is not incidental. It is our method. Books are how the tradition is transmitted. Books are how the minds are formed. Books are how man in the twenty first century can sit at the feet of Aristotle and Aquinas and Burke and Chesterton and receive across the centuries the formation that his parish and his school and his university, frankly, largely failed to give him. We're a book driven community, and the name should say so.

What An Academy Really Is

SPEAKER_01 2:50

The academy is not a building or an institution. It's the oldest word in the Western tradition for a community of serious people committed to thinking well together. Plato's academy was a grove of olive trees outside Athens, where men gathered to pursue wisdom in common. That is what we're trying to build here. Not in Athens, but here, now in the middle of the culture that has largely forgotten about what serious formation looks like. The Mojo Book Academy. That is who we are. So what is coming and when?

America 250 Series Roadmap

SPEAKER_01 3:28

We're completing something before we're going to begin something new, and the timing is deliberate. For the last two to three months, we've been inspired cultivating a four-part America 250 YouTube series. The first one's already released, Defending Liberty. The second part, the economic miracle, will be coming this coming weekend. Third part, religious freedom is coming, and the case for America will happen right before July 4th. That has been our gift to the anniversary moment, America 250, 250 years of the greatest experiment and ordered liberty that the world has ever seen, and that deserves serious engagement, not just a passing mention. We have tried over that four-part series to give it just that. There's also companion substack pieces for each part that'll be published alongside when the videos are published. And that's where we're going deeper into the books and the arguments that the videos introduce. That series will conclude our first chapter. Then in the month following the America 250 celebrations, as the flags come down and the fireworks fade and the real work of living begins again, we will launch the next

New Newsletter And Five Pillars

SPEAKER_01 4:47

one. And that's the Building a Flourishing Life newsletter. So what will the newsletter be? It's not a pivot point, it's a fulfillment. Frankly, a fulfillment of the last five years and where this community has been moving toward. That building a flourishing newsletter will be our primary ongoing offering, a regular, substantive, book-driven letter organized around the five pillars we have come to understand as the architecture of the excellent life, of the flourishing life. The first pillar is faith, the sacramental Catholic intellectual tradition, the theology, the saints, the spiritual formation the church was always meant to provide and can provide again. Number two, the body, the body as a temple, discipline, strength, asceticism, not vanity, but virtue made physical. The tradition of fasting and self-denial that the great spiritual masters understood as essential to the integrated life. And then the one that we've really been hammering on for the last five years, the books, tried to tried to give so many of the books. And the books, they're always going to be our foundation, especially the Western canon, which almost no one reads anymore, the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is recovering quite well in the last 10 to 15 years, and then the American founding and the conservative inheritance. Those are the ideas that built civilization. And there's ideas that are trying to dismantle it. And we want to fight against that. Now, the fourth pillar is the soul. It's the inner order, it's the governance of the passions, the emotional and interior life that makes everything possible, what Aristotle called temperance, and what the spiritual masters called custody of the heart. And then finally, sanctity. That's the destination, that's the North Star, that's the conviction. Ancient Catholic and completely counter-cultural. That's the purpose of a human life is to become a saint, not someday, now, in the middle of the world, in the ordinary circumstances of work and family and parish community. So what we're going to strive to do is with each of the newsletters, serve one or more of these pillars. Every piece will be anchored to a book or to a tradition. Nothing will be published simply because it's timely or topical, though they might happen occasionally. It's always good to push back in the moment. But everything, almost everything, will be asked the same question before it goes out. Does this help a man to build a flourishing life? It's not to say that we're not dedicated to women. We are, but there's a lot of stuff out there for women. And primarily women like to be helped by women. And as you can tell, I'm a man. And men do not have the same resources as women, nor do men reach out to each other as resources. Men are primarily more readers, especially on the spiritual things. So that's where we believe we can make an inroad and make a dent and begin to give men the intellectual foundation and convic conviction to lead that sanctity of life, to try and be a saint, to begin again each and every day, and to hopefully build that flourishing life. So

Why Substack Why Now

SPEAKER_01 8:33

why now? I mean, why launching a newsletter now? Well, because the timing is convenient, but primarily because the podcast only reached so much. And the written word, especially on Substack, which is where our primary venue is going to be moving forward, it gains a lot of eyes. So we're launching it because the need is urgent. And as we argued in the manifesto that opens this Substack, the for the failure of formation in the West has been decades in the making. And it's been catastrophic in its consequences. The church stepped back from forming saints. The schools replaced the founding tradition with revisionist grievance. The universities declared war on Western civilization and then spent 40 years winning that war. And the result is a generation of men, serious men, faithful men, men of genuine goodwill, Christian men, not even Catholic, some Christian men, who are trying to build excellent lives without any formation. And that formation is what could make those lives possible. That's the gap that we exist to fill. We're not reinventing anything. We're simply trying to recover what has always been there, especially in the books. We've discovered that over the last five years, in the tradition, in the church's own treasury of wisdom about how a human being becomes over time through grace and discipline and community, the man he was made to be. So the America 250 series was about the civilization we have inherited and what it costs to build and how we should be grateful. Absolutely grateful. We live in the greatest country in the world's ever seen. The Building a Flourishing Life newsletter is about how to live that life up to that inheritance personally, spiritually, intellectually, physically, one book at a time. If we can lead those lives towards sanctity in the United States, perhaps we can then be a beacon to the world on how to live a flourishing life there.

Reclaiming The Meaning Of Mojo

SPEAKER_01 11:00

So now a word about mojo because we haven't addressed it. And we know what you might be thinking. Mojo sounds kind of corny. Like, what are you doing, David? Mojo sounds like a motivational brand. Sounds like a podcast about morning routines and cold plunges and crushing your goals. And we address this in a piece that's going to be coming out, but it bears repeating here just for context. Because we're going to take the word back. Mojo, in its original deepest meaning, deepest sense, is the integrated vitality of a man fully alive. Not just the performative energy of the hustle culture influencer. So the word's been hijacked a little bit in the last 10 years. The real thing, the deep and rooted and directed energy of a man whose faith is serious, whose mind is formed and whose body is disciplined, whose interior life is ordered and whose entire existence is pointed towards the only destination serious enough to organize a life around. That man has genuine mojo, and we're going to help rediscover it. Now Aristotle would have called it eudaimonia, the full flourishing of a human being living in accordance with his highest nature. Aquinas would have called it Beatitude, the happiness that comes from a life ordered towards God. The saints over 2,000 years have simply called it holiness. We're going to call it mojo. It's our own spin, if you will, but we're going to recapture that word and not let the hustle culture influencer hijack it. We're going to spend the next chapter of this community helping to build it and redefine it.

Three Asks Bring Someone Start Reading

SPEAKER_01 12:57

So what we ask of you is three things. If you've been a Team Mojo Academy subscriber, your subscription transfers automatically to the Mojo Book Academy. Nothing changes on your end, everything gets better on ours. Bring someone with you. The building of a flourishing life newsletter will be most powerful as a community, not just a reading list. If you know a man, a friend, a brother, a son, a colleague who is searching for the formation that the culture failed to give him, send them this announcement. We're going to introduce a start here series to make it very easy to show you who we are and what we're doing. Let him find his way here before the launch. We have roughly about a month. And then begin reading. No one reads anymore. But we'll offer five pillar reading list to be published in the weeks and months before as the newsletter is launched. So pick a pillar, pick a book, and start before we start. Come to the first issue already in motion, even with your mojo on. So the starting point, every great journey needs a starting point, a clear beginning. And ours is this the America 250 celebrations will end, the bunting will come down, the speeches will be forgotten, and we will be left, as we always are, with the ordinary circumstances of our lives, our families, our work, our parishes, our communities, our interiors, our frustrations, our successes. And the question that no political celebration can answer is how do we actually live all this? That's the question where building a flourishing life newsletter will begin. Not with a theory, but with a book, with an idea from the tradition, with one concrete step towards one of the five pillars, with a conviction, ancient, Catholic, classical, conservative, that the flourishing life is not a dream or a luxury or a distant aspiration, it's available now to any man willing to pursue it with seriousness and humility and the help of the great tradition that has always been pointing towards it for the last twenty-five centuries. We have a new name, we have a sharpened mission. We certainly have the books. We have that tradition and a community of men ready to do the work, to build that flourishing life. One step at a time. Let us begin.

Closing And Where To Go Next

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojocademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your emojo.