Skip to content
HeightsCast

Teaching the History of our “Strange New World”

Featuring and

To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they’ve surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled “History of Western Thought.” In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch discuss the course and one of its accompanying texts: Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022).

HOWT covers essential texts from Plato’s Republic to Pope Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address.”. Its goal is not only to prepare students for college work but to prepare them to meaningfully engage with the culture they will inherit, understanding its origins and its underlying assumptions.

Chapters:

2:31 History of Western Thought course
8:10 The “HOWT” syllabus
11:31 Strange New World, a primary source guide
14:13 Teens and the intellectual tradition
16:39 Seeing ideologies in motion
18:48 Pairing philosophical threads
27:26 Understanding our cultural moment
29:25 Pushing back on ‘authenticity’
33:31 How students respond to the course
35:09 Thinking about friendship
41:04 Big ideas in a short class
44:32 Reading Trueman alongside your son

Links:

Strange New World by Carl Trueman

“Canada Is Killing Itself” by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic, September 2025

Texts from the HOWT course:

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman

Republic by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

De Officiis by Cicero

Moralia, vol. 1, featuring “How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend” by Plutarch

Confessions by Augustine

Summa theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas

Utopia by Thomas More

Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI

Also on the Forum:

American Restlessness featuring Dr. Benjamin Storey

A Study for All Seasons: On the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko

Is The Heights a Classical School? by Michael Moynihan

Featured Opportunities:

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

About the Authors

Michael Moynihan

Head of Upper School, The Heights School

A native of Rochester, NY, Michael Moynihan graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame Honors Program in 1992. After teaching for one year and earning a master’s degree in theology from The Catholic University of America,

Learn More

Austin Hatch

Ninth Grade Core, History of Western Thought, Jackson Scholars Senior Thesis

Austin Hatch began teaching at The Heights in 2004. He teaches 9th Grade Core and The History of Western Thought, and he directs The Jackson Scholars senior thesis program. He returned to the school in 2012 after two years in Houston, Texas as assistant headmaster, athletic director, basketball coach, and homeroom teacher at Western Academy. He has taught natural history, logic, English, and writing. He began his teaching and coaching career at St. John’s College High School in Washington, DC  in 1996. He holds a B.A. in English from the Catholic University of America and a Master’s in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Austin’s wife, Elizabeth, is a family physical therapist and a home-schooling mother. The Hatches have seven children: Kiley, John Austin (’21), Samuel (’24), Beatrice, Flannery, Ezekiel, and Nathaniel.

Learn More

Subscribe to The Heights Forum Newsletter

Name(Required)
I'm interested in content for...
Select if you'd like to receive a monthly newsletter specifically for any of these educator roles.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.