Faber Institute Podcast

About Faber Institute Podcast

The Faber Institute, founded in Portland, OR in October 2014, is about awakening people as God does it, showing them how to intensify and to sustain inner alertness (the virtues) and training their capacities to recognize and to serve the highest good of persons who find and develop their lives within the natural world (creation) and the human world (society and culture). We train them to become quicker to recognize and to distinguish (discernment) the false modes of being a person, persuading them to choose, and to trust, the long-tested and true paths to becoming fully alive, so that they joyfully accept their responsibilities for the common good of all – becoming “God-like” after the pattern of Jesus Christ.

Publisher

Faber Institute

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Feb 2012

Latest episode

21 Apr 2026

Latest episodes

225 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Apr 2026

   The Night School with John Donne (1572-1631)

   DESCRIPTION - TNS 18,4 - John Donne (1572-1631) on 21 April 2026 John Donne (1572-1631) is a contemporary of our Guest at The Night School last month - St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622). Both were “divines”, which means “One who has officially to do with ‘divine things’; formerly, any ecclesiastic, priest, or other member of the clergy; now, one skilled in divinity; a theologian.” The latter was particularly famous for his letters of spiritual direction; the former, our Guest this month, is esteemed for his religious poetry, especially for his “Holy Sonnets”. His life and his understanding of God and religion, grounded in the convictions and habits of medieval Europe, came to pieces in the emergent “new world” of science and of the constantly, often violently, changing political scene. His personal failures and suffering deepened him to such a degree that he trained for the Priesthood and was ordained in 1615. Then when his wife died in 1617, his suffering increased and drove him deeper into the mystery of God and life. It is in this context that he composed his justifiably famous “Holy Sonnets”. He is judged the greatest of what came to be called “the Metaphysical poets”. (George Herbert, a previous Guest of The Night School, is counted among this number.) With our Guest this month, we will look closely at these sonnets, in whom we find some of the most famous lines in English poetry. For example, “Death be not proud” and “What if the present were the world’s last night?” and “Batter my heart three person’d God” and in a prose essay, “No man is an island.” Welcome to the closing Part of The Night School, Series 18.

2. 

   17 Mar 2026

   The Night School with St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)

   DESCRIPTION: TNS 18, 3 - St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) on 17 March 2026 Our Guest in this Part III of The Night School, Series 18, is one of the giants in the art of Spiritual Direction. He sought to heal the Church’s obvious ills in an Age when it was tearing itself apart, from within. Unlike those reformers who moved to attack vigorously the words and works of the Church’s (internal) “enemies”, St. Francis de Sales followed another Path. His way earned him the highest designation the Church can bestow on any  person - being proclaimed a “Doctor of the Church” in 1877 (only 38 of them exist in the whole history of the Church). St. Francis was convinced that the source of the Church’s difficulties came from the “learned” Church (of which he was one), who having never fully understood the love of God, and as a result had never paid the price of becoming as loving as God is towards others, distorted the teaching of God, fomenting division and enmity within the Church. The internal battles became about “taking sides”, about despising one’s intellectual enemies, and even becoming murderous when dealing with them. And these distortions in the intellect quickly became calamity in the social dimensions of the Church. St. Francis, who interestingly had to suffer a fierce temper for much of his life, is remembered for the kindness and gentleness that “breathes” through all he spoke and wrote. He was beloved and a source of unity and patience and forbearance - a credible, costly example of divine love, demonstrating what that looks like in a person and to what effects. He wrote: “True devotion does better still. It not only does no injury to one’s vocation [by which he means primarily the “lay” vocation], but on the contrary adorns and beautifies it.” And, “In short, devotion is simply that spiritual agility and vivacity by which charity [divine love active in a cooperating human being] works in us or by aid of which we do good works quickly and lovingly.” Welcome to The Night School.

3. 

   17 Feb 2026

   The Night School with St. Bede the Venerable (672-735 CE)

   DESCRIPTION - TNS 18, 2 - St. Bede the Venerable (672-735 CE), Doctor of the Church - on the (biblical text) Song of Songs - Love as Learning Our Guest has been understood to have been the most learned of the Anglo-Saxon Christians. The particular Form of love that we will notice in him is his love expressed in his devotion to learning of God and of the world that God has given us. The age of the Anglo-Saxons extends from the time when the Romans lost control of Britain around 410 CE up to 1066 CE when the Normans invaded Britain. The Anglo-Saxons (the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes - invaders from modern day Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands) were the original “English” peoples (vs. the Britons who were far older, Celtic, inhabitants of Britain), and the type of English that they spoke and wrote was what we call “Old English”. Bede was only 7-years old when he entered a monastery (Benedictine), spending the rest of his life there. Mostly teaching himself by his voracious reading, he had what was clearly a divine desire (what we call a “charism”) to love God through learning. And because God is lord of all, so Bede became through extraordinary effort a polymath; i.e., he became an accomplished student of many disciplines, not just the Bible and all the ways of reading it, not just of Theology, but also, and most famously, of History, and more specifically, his writing of the history of how the Anglo-Saxons came to become Christians. His Ecclesiastical History of the English [i.e., Anglo-Saxon] People is a founding document of the whole discipline of History. Last month at The Night School, our Guest was the author of the biblical book, Song of Songs. This month, we will appreciate how Bede’s love for learning gave him the insights he had into Song of Songs. We will explore sections of his Commentary on Song of Songs. Welcome to the Night School.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

2,806

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

23 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 58 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

58

Social presence

0

YouTube

68

Engagement

77

Contact Faber Institute Podcast

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.