Dante, Wonder, & Raising Kids Who Love Truth

Adam Minihan and Dave Niles open this episode with a story about two broken-down vehicles, a newborn daughter named Mary, and a prayer over a dying engine that — Amen — actually worked. From there they settle in with some Basil Hayden bourbon and turn to a piece of Dante most people have never read: the Convivio, his unfinished philosophical treatise written during his exile from Florence.

The main topic: wonder. What it is, why Dante considered it the most critical virtue to cultivate in adolescence, and what we lose when we crush it in our kids… often without realizing it.

Dante divides life into four stages: adolescence (birth to 25), youth (25 to 45), old age (45 to 70), and extreme old age (70 and beyond). Each stage has its own virtues and tasks. But it’s adolescence — the age of obedience, wonder, and ordering loves — that Dante treats with the most urgency. Because wonder, once crushed, is very hard to resurrect.

Adam and Dave unpack why screens flatten the imagination, why GK Chesterton’s wonder at green grass wasn’t eccentricity but sanity, and why Dante’s most devastating line about education still applies today: if you raise kids without wonder, you may make them competent… but not wise.

Also in this episode: the connection between Dante and Aquinas, the KU Integrated Humanities Program and David Dean, a monk at Clear Creek who hadn’t read his prior’s book and why that was one of the wisest things Dave has ever seen, and the difference between knowledge and wisdom in the age of AI.

Deacon Harrison Garlick’s Ascend the Great Books podcast is working through the Purgatorio right now. If you’re not following along, this episode is a good reason to start.

This episode brought to you in partnership with Select International Tours — selectinternationaltours.com.

Topics covered in this episode:

1. Adam’s van saga, a dying alternator, and what happens when you pray like Jeff Cavins
2. Dante’s exile from Florence and why Pope Boniface VIII ended up in the eighth circle of hell
3. The four stages of life from the Convivio — adolescence, youth, old age, and extreme old age — and the virtues and tasks for each
4. Why Dante places the pinnacle of life at age 33 (and why that’s not a coincidence)
5. Wonder vs. ignorance — Dante’s distinction and why it matters for how we raise kids
6. Screens and the flattening of wonder — Dave’s strong opinion, delivered with characteristic conviction
7. GK Chesterton and the green grass
8. “You cannot love that which you have never wondered at” — Dante’s most profound parenting insight
9. The connection between leisure and wonder — why you can’t have one without the other
10. Why the goal is heaven, not Harvard

Referenced in this episode:

1. The Convivio (The Banquet) — Dante Alighieri
2. The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio) — Dante Alighieri
3. Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder — Dennis Quinn
4. Ascend the Great Books Podcast — Deacon Harrison Garlick
5. David Dean — humanities professor, student of John Senior’s program at KU
6. Jeff Cavins