Welcome to this Season 3 update for BetterPears and The BetterPears Podcast. I am Dr. Jason Fugikawa, founder of BetterPears and managing member of FugiCor, LLC, its parent company. This blog post and podcast will include updates on Season 3 of The BetterPears Podcast, a new perk for BetterPears Leaves contributors, the online reading course for St. Augustine’s Confessions in the original Latin, and further reflection on the kind of community that BetterPears is seeking to grow.
Season 3 of The BetterPears Podcast
At the time of this update, episodes of The BetterPears Podcast have been downloaded over 62,000 times. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to our growing audience who have subscribed to the BetterPears newsletter and social media channels. Each episode clocks in under 15 minutes and captures insights, reflections, and fruitful wonder which have been a joy to share and commit to text and speech. While our intended schedule for last season of “an episode a week” was a bit too ambitious for the time it takes to properly edit and ruminate in a sustainable way. The episode “every two weeks” cadence near the end of the season proved more manageable and beneficial to the final issue. Using this schedule, Season 3 will take us through the tumultuous election season of 2024 and into winter. The topics to be addressed will build off ideas introduced in the first two seasons but will remain episodic, that is, accessible as standalone works.
Season 3 will begin with our BetterPears Leaves contributors’ choice “Carpe – καρπός,” which explores the interesting correlation between the Latin verb for grasping and the Greek word for fruit. The rest of the season will address a wide range of topics from gravity, so-called artificial intelligence, immolation, tectum and τέχνη, comedy, the dollar and doles, gold and hearing, fate, critical thinking, books and freedom, all before the finale considering St. Augustine’s treatment of enjoyment and use, or frui and uti, full circle back to fruit and taking.
Support The BetterPears Podcast
There are two main way you can assist the work of BetterPears with respect to the podcast. 1) Please share the Podcast with your family and friends. We do not pay for podcast promotion and so our shows grow through their popularity on their platforms and personal recommendations from readers and listeners like yourself. 2) Please comment on episodes that you find insightful, agreeable, or perhaps even disagreeable. Our online offerings are designed to fit into the margins of your life so as not to intrude on the key human relations that should rightly fill your day. Plus, livestreaming is unnecessarily stress inducing from a production perspective. This means that your comments are our best form of feedback on episodes and another way for media platforms to see that our episodes are worth presenting to additional audiences.
We are excited to bring you Season 3 starting this July. If you have not already done so, please sign up for the BetterPears newsletter at BetterPears.com/contact to receive important emails on new episodes and additional updates.
Win your very own BetterPears Mug with BetterPears Leaves.
Our crowdfunding platform, BetterPears Leaves functions similar to Patreon but sends monthly contributors of $12 or more fractional gold in the mail instead of “Behind the Scenes” clips and gag reels. Just like the ideas presented in BetterPears episodes and in-person fellowships are designed to spark wonder and interest in intentional living. The ownership of monetary gold, even a small fraction of an ounce, changes perspectives and invites further questions about our οἶκος and economy.
To attract more BetterPears Leaves contributors, every month for the rest of 2024 beginning in July one lucky BetterPears Leaves contributor will be randomly selected to receive a complimentary BetterPears, 11 oz. ceramic mug of his or her choice from the BetterPears Market in addition to the monthly Goldback.
Official sweepstakes rules will be coming soon, but all current contributors will receive additional entries for prior contribution months and share bonus entries for new contributors whom they refer to BetterPears Leaves. If you have been on the fence about supporting BetterPears financially, now is a great time to begin contributing. Your federal reserve notes help keep BetterPears operational and allows us to further develop our online and in-person offerings. The expenses of operating BetterPears still exceed our monthly contributions and sales revenue. The good news is that, on account of our bootstrapped budget, your contributions have an exceedingly disproportionate effect in securing and growing BetterPears relative to other media, culture, and thought leaders in this space. If you have not already, please visit BetterPears.com/Leaves today and join us in forming this cultural empire.
St. Augustine’s Confessions:
A new online offering on the horizon is our first online course, indeed the first of its kind as a stand-alone close reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book I in Latin. This course will contain six video sessions in which I offer a close, guided reading of the original Latin text. As much as possible the course will simulate the desired exchange of an in-person BetterPears Fellowship, in which the guide provides vocabulary and grammatical assistance but invites the fellow reader to construe the meaning individually. The online course taken at the student’s pace will be priced similarly to our in-person fellowship sessions so as to encourage the live events without limiting those who do not yet have an in-person fellowship near them.
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 noted 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, this course under development on St. Augustine’s Confessions in Latin 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 or ambitious scholar seeking a purpose to Latin language studies beyond primers and textbooks.
Leisure: The Basis of Culture
In his short work on leisure, Josef Pieper made the daring claim that the priority for rebuilding Germany after the Second World War was not a headlong push into pragmatism and industry but rather a restoration of leisure and its foundational importance for culture. In the course of his philosophic essay, he makes the case that right thinking and properly ordered ends in human activity and labor are precisely the thing that a society that has lost its way must re-establish before successfully setting off down the road of history. The United States as well as much of the modern world has, if one were to pay close attention, lost its way, its purpose beyond merely sustaining itself and the status quo.
BetterPears is a small work with big ideas focused on building communities of people fixed on ensuring the common good. The principal good of these communities is the wisdom of our betters, those who came before and listened to the truth, both revealed and reasoned. In an age of digital communication, this would not seem so difficult a task, and yet I invite you to consider how many authentic communities have you experienced, how many endured a change of circumstance such as graduation or career shift. If you are enmeshed in such communities, you are truly blessed. May you welcome others into this blessing. If you are without a community so considered, BetterPears offers an open seat in the fellowship and a wealth wisdom handed down from one restless heart to another, wisdom not to be force fed and credentialized but wondered and received in due time.
To recap, The BetterPears Podcast returns in July, BetterPears Leaves will include a ceramic mug sweepstakes as an additional thank you for your support and incentive to attract others, a course on St. Augustine’s Confessions in Latin is in production, and the cultural empire continues to encourage leisure and ask the important questions about life and true living.
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