ADMMXXIV Retrospective

 And so we bid farewell to the Year of Our Lord 2024. It was an interesting year, a unique year. Dare I say there will never be its like again.

Photo by me. You can't have it unless you ask nicely.

It was not a banner year for the Goode household, but it wasn't the kind that you wince when somebody names, either. 2024 is like that one friend we all have that we don't remember to even think about until he appears across the room at the party and waves. A good fellow, but not very flashy.

So this little retrospective will contain nothing more earth-shattering than normal life. Of course Chesterton would remind us (were he here) that there is nothing less normal than normal life. For is it not in the everyday round of sleep, meals, germs, fellowship, work, and food that immortal souls are forged? So let's work through some areas where God was doing some forging.

Faith

I am thankful for my pastor and elders, who I'm sure dealt with a lot so that the flock didn't have to, and that they live holy lives coram deo. Under their watchful eye my congregation and my faith continued to grow last year. I'm grateful that King's Cross finally got to move into one service in December, and that the move has been logistically smooth! It's been wonderful to see all my fellow KC'ers, and to keep hunting for better ways to serve them. Though I do miss the old cushy chairs.

On a more personal note, if God showed me anything this year, it is that two virtues I'm short on are fides and temperantia. A host of tiny, everyday trials revealed that I don't like trusting God for much, and I'm often bad at doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. James IV 17 is always a hard-hitting verse, and I need to let it pierce my soul many more times in the coming year. Of course, discipline is built of will and difficulty, so that means I'm asking for God to send some tricky stuff my way in this coming year. Be praying for the Goode household that we would learn our lessons, and be a light to those who walk in darkness. 

Adoption

Speaking of tricky stuff, this is big enough to warrant a post of its own (coming soon!). But for those of you who won't see (or don't want to take the time to read) the full version, know that we are still in the waiting period, where we have stayed for all of 2024. One of these days we still hope we'll get that phone call. God and our friends have been very generous financially, so that is not currently a burden--we must simply stand and wait. If the Lord puts us on your hearts, please pray for our patience, our preparedness, and for that birth mom out there somewhere.

Vocation

It's no secret that I love my calling: taking complicated information I've somehow acquired and giving it to others in simplified, organized form. That is really the heart of teaching. In 2024 I got to do that for two different organizations: Logos Online School and New Saint Andrews College. Both have been in an exciting period of expansion, with record numbers of students joining in the fall.

I have been with LOS longer, so I'll start there. The end of my fourth year teaching (and the beginning of my fifth!) went very well. I got to teach some fun summer classes (Writing, American War for Independence, and American Civil War). I continue to teach Humanities II (the ancient world) and Writing. Hannibal is the best, and Plato is wiser than many Christians think he is. I hope I've helped some high schoolers see the same.

New Saint Andrews is handling doubling in size over the last three years with a lot of grace and a fair amount of flexibility. I'm grateful that for the second year in a row they let me help Brent Pinkall run one of the premier classical rhetoric courses in the country. Getting to hang out with the faculty and visitors (debating questions great and small) are some of the highlights of my professional career thus far. It's been a generously, uproariously, hilariously fun. My freshmen generally work hard, and I'm always proud of how far they come at the end of each year. And when they eat sausages. 

Writing and Books

2024 was a banner year for reading--I read more books than I have in any other year since I started keeping count (though I'm pretty sure some of my junior high years have it beat). My writing was less impressive. I intended to try to write at least two blog posts a month, but I haven't really put anything on here since about July. Since I missed some Book of the Month posts, here are some highlight reads from the back half of the year:

• Disputations on Holy Scripture by William Whitaker. Trans. William Fitzgerald. A ponderous tome exhaustively covering the doctrine of the canon and sufficiency of Scripture against the papists attacks of the 16^th C. This increases my difficulty in seeing how any well-read modern could cross the Tiber on the merits of pure argument. Roman theology is simply inconsistent.
• I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard. Trans. James G. Williams. By turns brilliant and oddly limited—mostly by his refusal to take Christianity literally rather than anthropologically. Darwinism is strange juju. However, his insight about mimetic tensions and violence is (as Pr. Wilson has claimed) very good. And for a philosopher, the man could write.
• Anabasis by Xenophon. Trans. Shane Brennan (Landmark). Very good—a philosophical discussion of leadership disguised as a history account. Thalassa! Thalassa!
• Literature and the American College by Irving Babbitt. Together with the long introduction by Russell Kirk, this is an eminently quotable and astonishingly prescient (1908) work on what would happen with the fall of the old liberal arts or “humanist” education. If you want to know what is wrong with modern colleges, this might be a good place to start.
• Eugenics and Other Evils by G.K. Chesterton. I actually should have read this during Covid, because he has a lot of amazing things to say about the types of people who like to chase science into the arms of govt overreach. The chapter “The Eclipse of Liberty” was particularly good—even the Distributist bits.
• Encomium Moriae by Erasmus of Rotterdam (trans. Betty Radice). This book makes me feel as though I don’t even know what classically educated even means yet. Quite the masterpiece. I need to read this two or three more times to really grasp what he's doing here.
• Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield. A biography of Plato’s life and work by the translator of my favorite version of the Republic. Very good, it debunked a couple of myths I’d believed and gave a good overall picture of his work.
• A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II by William Stevenson. The story of Bill Stephenson, the architect and director of the British Security Coordination, which worked with the OSS to run clandestine operations in WWII. Stevenson more or less invented the modern espionage service. It's also quite gripping. Makes me wonder how much more has been declassified since it was published in 1972.

However, I did manage to publish my first paid article in the fall issue of the ACCS magazine The Classical Difference, on Marsilius of Padua and his groundbreaking Defensor Pacis. Keep your eyes out for another article in the coming months! I'm on X now (@Goodeguystuff) as well as Facebook (James Goode), and I'm trying to grow both platforms as an aid to networking and giving people solid educational content and a bit of humor. I'd appreciate if you'd give me a follow, and a perspicacious comment now and again. I also try Substack ("The Goode Stuff") now and again.

Moscow

My little town in the pipe-stem of Idaho continues to grow, both via emigrants and hordes of cute babies. It's great to be surrounded by friends who would have your back if trouble came knocking, to be able to walk to the post office and the grocery store, and to see my students strolling down Main Street. There's plenty of building and fighting to do for all of us. 2024 was, however, a rather high year for germs. I hope everybody washes their hands more in the future. Speaking of nasty, there have been a few more controversies online--Johnny Cash ads and debates about Jewry--but it's astonishing how little difference or kerfluffle this makes down on the ground. If you only know Moscow from online media, I would encourage you to come visit and get to know the real town and real people. Social media is a poor way to form an impression. And I'll invite you over for dinner in the bargain--my wife makes a mean loaf of bread.

Family

God continued to be utterly merciful to my people in 2024. It's been over twenty years since even an extended Goode family member has died, and we've cherished every year we can get. The Sumpters in town keep inviting me over for dinner, and their Thanksgiving bashes keep growing. I married a girl from a good bunch, and every year proves that more.

Cute as ever...

In spite of the fact that we're in the middle of nowhere as far as travel is concerned, we still managed to see quite a few folks. Molly and I shuffled out to West Point in the spring for some organ music like no other, visited the '76 House where men like Washington, Hamilton, Henry Knox, and John Andre leaned on the bar (and celebrated our fourth anniversary by eating breakfast in an old dining car!) My parents made the reverse trip out this summer to drop off another Goode college freshman (and all my old stuff). It's great to have 50% of the family within a few hours' drive; I keep hoping for the day when all ten of us kids will make it to the same place at the same time. We've got grandbabies everywhere (I'm going to need an app to keep track of all my nieces and nephews at this rate) and I've got grandparents who still send me gifts as they climb into their 90's. Truly, we have been blessed, and I'm grateful for y'all.

Goals

So what's next? In the coming year I want to finally finish up my Masters in Classical Studies from NSA, write a bit more regularly (keep an eye out for that here), lose another five pounds or so, get to where I can read Cicero in Latin, and become a better teacher and a harder worker. And I'd love to bump into a few of you readers and find out what sort of things you'd like to see tumble from my typing fingers.

2024 was a good year--here's to what God will do in 2025!