Welcome to this update for BetterPears. I am Dr. Jason Fugikawa, founder of BetterPears and managing member of FugiCor, LLC, the parent company of BetterPears. This blog post and podcast will include updates on my career transition, the BetterPears Mission, and the year ahead followed by a closing insight for your reading or listening edification.
Updates:
Career Transition
We now begin with an update on my career. Monday, December 18th was my final official day of employment with my former employer, although I relinquished my main duties in mid-November. I am grateful for the opportunity to have served in my previous role for the last six years following the closing of St. Gregory’s University here in Oklahoma, which allowed me to continue providing theological and catechetical instruction to the faithful of this state. In a special way, I remain grateful to the clergy of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, and, yes, that includes the permanent diaconate, for their prayers, counsel, and consolation.
Mission
BetterPears was born out of a reflection on what really matters in life and our human relations. Remaining true to its mission, BetterPears will continue to offer better fruit for the human soul, the wisdom of our betters, in their original words, in the company of good friends. Although in the short-term, we plan strategically to leverage digital media outlets to expand interest in BetterPears regionally and nationally.
My vision for BetterPears is that it can become an engine for renewal in fallen world that looks to the past in order to present truths for our relationally connected future. While I hope that one day, BetterPears will be able to support my family entirely, my current trajectory for BetterPears is to provide supplementary income during this transition as its audience and support base grows.
The Year Ahead
This brings us now to the year ahead. In 2024, Season 1 of The BetterPears Podcast will be coming to Rumble and YouTube. We are adding video platforms to our audio podcast to attract new listeners. Videos will have low visuals, that is, a static title slide with a dynamic sound waveform, because we depend too much on screens and the podcast is designed for attentive listening not viewing. In terms of demographics, Rumble and YouTube are where our potential new listeners are so I ask that you subscribe to these channels and like the videos when they drop to help us with the algorithms. The audio podcast will remain a priority even with these video outlets, and new episodes of Season 2 will arrive first to podcast subscribers before their delayed syndication to video.
The Season 2 premiere of The BetterPears Podcast is set for the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, January 6, 2024. New episodes will continue to drop each Saturday morning. The full list of episodes for Season 2 are now posted on our Community Supported Analysis page (BetterPears.com/CSA). BetterPears remains dependent on your support to continue our work in bringing you insights into the created order and our experience of life and language. Please consider sponsoring a podcast episode, making a one-time contribution to BetterPears, or becoming a monthly supporter through the links at BetterPears.com/CSA.
In addition to our established podcast, video interviews with insightful guests are in development. Talking with people about BetterPears often initiates colorful and constructive conversations with other pilgrim compatriots. In an effort to capture what endures and inspires from these conversations, we are developing a short form interview series focused on perennial topics and insights. As this project involves many more moving parts than our current production schedule, these interviews will launch in late spring or early summer 2024.
From conversations we turn to Confessions, St. Augustine’s Confessions. I had the pleasure and challenge of teaching St. Augustine’s Confessions in Latin to high school sophomores during my professional teaching days in New Hampshire a decade ago. What I discovered was the rhetorical genius of St. Augustine that is oft spoken of but never quite engaged as we tend to only encounter his works through the filter of translation. By entering humbly through the low threshold of an ancient, and, indeed, foreign language wielded by one of its masters, we must slow our gait and savor its meaning. In an ideal world or perhaps a world yet to come, we would pour over this work together, present in body and united in purpose.
In the meantime and as a certain aperitive, we are developing a course on St. Augustine’s Confessions in Latin which will be hosted on Teachable.com and accessible through the BetterPears.com website. Keeping with our arboreal theme, we are calling this online course catalogue, The BetterPears Nursery. The project will be limited initially to Book 1 of the Confessions on account of the great investment in time and energy required to produce such a course. The target audience will be those who have (or at one time had) a strong proficiency in Latin, such as a former student of Latin in high school or college looking for a structured way to rekindle an old love or a current homeschool student seeking a purpose to Latin studies beyond primers and textbooks.
In addition to BetterPears branded content and merchandise, I am now offering micro-consultations on classical education, theology, philosophy, and paternal decision making through a platform called Minnect. Minnect is a phone app that allows you to submit questions to leaders in business, entrepreneurship, and media at a fixed rate with the assurance of a timely response either as a text message, video message, or video call. My work and experience which has inspired BetterPears is certainly a niche within the spectrum of all possible livelihoods, but one, I believe, that can benefit governing boards and administrators of Catholic classical schools, homeschooling parents, and fathers seeking to navigate a world once again becoming hostile to their faith and infecting the young with some of the worst ideologies yet to develop in the West. Minnect will allow me as well as future BetterPears Fellows to connect with our audience directly in a medium that will provide mutual value for all parties. Links to Minnect and my Minnect profile are available at BetterPears.com/consulting
As a final update, we are excited to announce additional products in the BetterPears Market, your home for BetterPears merchandise. We have branched out from our beloved coffee mugs to include a growing collection of IYKYK T-Shirts featuring deep-cut Latin and Ancient Greek quotations with accompanying citations. We are also offering a collection called Attention Apparel focused on economic and political conversation pieces veiled in snarky wordplay and adapted pop culture references.
In celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord and our Season 2 launch, we will be offering five BetterPears Bundles. These assorted bundles available to ship within the United States include merchandise from the BetterPears Market as well as Goldbacks. Each Goldback contains 1/1000th of a Troy ounce of 24 karat gold sealed within a polymer substrate. It is estimated that less than 0.5% or only one in 200 Americans owns more than an ounce of physical gold, despite the nominal and real inflationary risk of federal reserve notes. Physical gold, whether held personally or in vaulted storage, provides assurance for the buying power of your wealth amid turbulent financial times. Goldbacks are a relatively new physical gold product that solves an ancient problem of using gold for small transactions and provide a great way for young and old to discover the economic principles that separate gold from fiat currencies. BetterPears is not alone in this; Goldbacks were recently featured by the Tuttle Twins.
Please see the links in the description for more information on this development of real gold, the gift fit for a King.
Closing Insight
I would like to close this update podcast, this Episode Zero of Season 2 with a recent insight from my professional discernment. As you may know, I earned a doctorate in systematic theology from Ave Maria University over a decade ago as member of the program’s inaugural class. At the time of my residential studies there were two specializations open to me, moral theology and systematic theology. I remember joking at the time that the moral theologians should receive “combat pay” as they would spend their entire careers attempting to convince those in positions of authority, who did not ask for their opinion, not to commit or omit actions which our modern Machiavellians were already dead set on doing. The systematic theologian, in contrast, would converse with those presumably on the same page with respect to the central tenets of the faith and argue over more nuanced distinctions of the created order. The word “system” is derived from the Greek preposition “σύν” meaning “with” or “together” similar to the Latin “cum” and the verb “ἵστημι” meaning “to set up” or “to establish” similar to the Latin transitive verb “sisto, sistere” or its related, primarily intransitive verb “sto, stare”.
A system, therefore, is a setting up together of things, such as the created order. Just as a moral theologian must constantly guard against becoming an immoral, moral theologian, a systematic theologian must guard against establishing a system or organization of the created order, i.e. creation, that does not conform to what God has established and revealed directly through the Deposit of Faith and indirectly through nature understood according to right reason. In short, God creates the system in which we find ourselves. It is not the case that the systematic theologian devises a system and succeeds in conforming God to it. So was the structure of my craft for over a decade until “midway through the course of our life” or appropriately for this audience:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
This initial stanza from Dante’s Inferno, correlated for me to an a-systematic tendency in my professional work. Again, this did not mean that I was imposing my system of theology upon God’s, but rather I was withdrawing from the desire to systematize, that is, organize and codify what could be concluded from faith and reason. As a Socratic educator, I have never been a practitioner in fixed lesson planning and the structuring of educational presentations. I would much rather give my classes over to pursuing spontaneous responses to well-crafted initial questions than choreograph slide presentations which facilitated mere mimesis.
It was not until I reflected over Season 1 of The BetterPears Podcast and set to organize Season 2 that I realized my misplaced hope in systematic theology. The fundamental hope of systematic theology is not that the systematic theologian adequately assimilates his system of theological understanding to God’s. Its hope is more akin to the moral theologian’s that the goodness of living according to right reason in light of what has been revealed through faith is not only intelligible to one’s interlocutor but ultimately appetible, indeed, more appetible than sin and vice. In a similar way, the fundamental hope of systematic theology is that the intelligibility of the created order viewed through theology, philosophy, history, and philology is mutually accessible to human beings and that the unfolding of this order, unmediated within the intellect of each individual is a certain joy of God’s providence. An educator can frustrate this joy by connecting all the ideas himself and alleviating too quickly the tension that wonder builds within a learner. Thus, the episodes of The BetterPears Podcast will remain precisely episodic, that is, a-systematic, as certain seed crystals for the human mind which provide the pattern of their primary patron. Episodes will continue to contain plays on word, bits of humor that go unnoticed by the inattentive eardrum or the unreflective eye. All this ad majorem Dei gloriam!
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