News and Updates:

Member referral program. Distance learners who get a friend to sign will earn a feat in the program — and you’ll both get a free shirt. Just tell them to put your name in the “referred by” slot on the application. Members in the RVA club, bring a friend and the same goes for you!

METTLE MAKER #504: America’s 25oth Independence Day and Habitude 3 of the Founding Fathers

Join us in cultivating the 7 Habitudes of the Founding Fathers! Step into their mindset and embrace their ideals. Embody the view that personal self-government is a prerequisite for political self-government. It’s the the perfect way to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence and honor the great men who made it a reality. Post your experiences with this exercise using the hashtag #7H250.

Habitude 3: Read Paper Books

Reading is reading, right? Wrong.

When you read on a phone or a tablet, there are infinite distractions. Email and text alerts are popping up. The internet is right there, begging you take one of a trillion easy off-ramps to look up a related idea, research a word, or investigate an idea sparked by the text. What happens is that for every 15 minutes you spend reading on phone or tablet you spend another 20 minutes dismissing alerts, reading a text message, googling something related to the text, or browsing the internet. Browsing the internet is just what it sounds like: browsing. Browsing random articles on Wikipedia or skimming articles on Wordpress is only slightly better than an hour spent browsing shop windows at the shopping mall. What’s the point? What did you do? What did you really learn, internalize, or achieve?

If you were going to study for an exam, would you open up a folding chair on a street corner in Times Square, or attempt to spread out a blanket on a Mumbai beach? Of course not. But that’s what you’re doing when you try to read while cradling in your hand the nexus of all human information and virtual activity.

The struggle to maintain digital sobriety is real and important (watch the video above). Paper books are a great place to start. They were good enough for the founding fathers and they’re good enough for us. In fact, reading a paper book is more than good enough – it’s superior to the alternatives. When it comes to focus, absorption, and real learning, paper books are superior to glowing, backlit, energy-sucking, distraction machines.

Reading a book should just be reading a book.

When selecting your reading material, consider Lindy’s Law, which states that the longer something has been extant, the longer we can expect to be extant. The mobile home you bought five years ago will probably be here five years from now. The Great Pyramid has been around for thousands of years and will likely be around for thousands more. Things that endure have proven endurance. With great books, mortality rate goes down with time, not up. People have been reading The Odyssey for two millennia, and they’ll be reading it for another two. It’s still sufficiently relevant that they just made a movie about it. You can’t go wrong reading the Holy Bible, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, or Cato. But that article you read at Slate, Boing Boing or the Daily Wire is not going to be around this time next year, must less in 500 years. Nor will it internalize any ideas in you or foster any behavioral changes.

Read classics or choose modern books of great quality. Try reading something from Thomas Jefferson’s recommended list of books for a private library. When searching for a fun, lighthearted read, you can still practice discernment. I’m slowly but surely working my way through everything I can find by O. Henry award-winner Edison Tesla Marshall. Presently I’m taking a break from heavy titles and reading a book for fun – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in hardback – and it’s a perfectly lovely book. I can practically smell the curry, saffron, and tobacco. I swear I can hear the horse traders haggling, the cries of the street vendors, and bells of camels. Want to read a comic book? How about Watchmen – the only comic book on Time’s list of 100 best novels. Or select something from Penguin’s top 100 fiction and non-fiction at the Modern Library website.

Don’t just put on a red-white-and-blue t-shirt, wave a flag, or go to a fireworks display this weekend. Spend the remainder of the year really emulating the founding fathers.

Want more American Rough ‘n’ Tumble goodness? Click here to sign up today for our distance learning program!

Sacred Reading for Sunday, 7/5/26

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Lectio Divina is an ancient way to interact with the Bible. Its four elements are reading, meditation, contemplation, and prayer. CLICK HERE for the Sunday Lectio exercise. To watch daily mass, CLICK HERE. For daily gospel reflections in your email box, SIGN UP HERE.