Ferdi Mcdermott

Chavagnes International College and Chavagnes Studium

Lecture delivered online on Monday 22nd February 2021 as part of the regular lecture series on faith and culture hosted by Chavagnes International College. In this lecture, Ferdi McDermott, Headmaster of Chavagnes International College discusses Pius XI's seminal encyclical on Catholic Education, puts it in context and applies its teaching to con...

A personal and historical essay on the place of the liturgy in a Catholic education. (From "New Liturgical Movement")

Ferdi McDERMOTT, “The faith I love best is hope”: Perspectives of Hope from Charles Péguy DOI 10.12887/32-2019-4-128-10 Following calls from recent popes to a rediscovery of the theological virtue of hope, this paper examines a poem dealing specifically with that subject, by Charles Péguy, a French poet who died in 1914 in the early fighting of th...

Some thoughts in preparation for a literature review on the content vs process debates in educational philosophy and the merits of the liberal education tradition.

The relationship of Lord and Lady Alfred Douglas was stormy, but not private. An unpublished poem of Douglas’s described it as “Forever in the Press”, and their correspdonence and poetry continues to cast light on their unlikely, enduring union. This article includes significant, unpublished original work of Lord Alfred Douglas and Olive Custance,...

Following calls from recent popes to a rediscovery of the theological virtue of hope, this paper examines a poem dealing specifically with that subject, by Charles Péguy, a French poet who died in 1914 in the earlly fighting of the First World War. He is a key figure of what has been called the French Catholic revival. His dramatic monologue takes...

Are people kinder today then they were before? Should schools be teaching them the Golden Rule as well as the rules of physics? And shouldn't education be not just about acquiring technical skills, but also the formation of right feelings and taste? The author has found much to admire in the work of Matthew Taylor at the RSA and thinks that "people...

Successful education has always been the guarantee of a successful state, and yet state control of education has usually been the preserve of totalitarian régimes. This paper charts the rise and fall of the classical education tradition and its relationship with state control. the suggestion is that liberal education should at the service of the st...

A proposal for a new educational philosophy for Nigeria.

How to deal in Catholic schools with the fragmentation of human knowledge and recent crises in anthropology. Some suggestions for the future.

In an age when artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the workplace, what place should we reserve for information technology in our future schools? Published in March 2018 in The Universe (UK Catholic newspaper) 'Education' supplement.

The two most prominent modern literary scholars to help give Olive Custance the attention she deserves are Patricia Pulham and Sarah Parker. Pulham’s focus is narrow, but well-argued. She is close to Custance’s poetics and is interested mainly in her themes and language. Parker is alive to the language too, but shows a keener interest in Custance’s...

The British writer, historian and television producer Jad Adams has produced a extensively researched biographical account of Olive Custance, published in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 61 no. 1, 2018, pp. 35-65. It is now, by a few hundred words, the longest such work in print (the other two shorter ones are Father Sewell's and...

Robert Burns was a Freemason and a Protestant, and yet he was drawn to the heroic pathos of the Jacobite position and had many Catholic admirers, even in Rome and Valadolid. What made Catholics admire him was his love of tradition, his love of life and his love of his fellow man. In this essay I explore the spirituality of Burns and the relations w...

Ferdi McDermott: Shaken and Taken: Hur en "liberal arts"-utbildning kan befria dig! Reflektioner av en rektor och lärare i humaniora. Published in "Skandinavisk Katolsk Tidskrift", nr. 5, June 2016.

An account of the life and lasting impact of St Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort , presented on the 300th anniversary of his death.

What place do celibate laypeople have in the Church, especially when they are devoted to apostolic work? This paper explores the evolution of attitudes within the Church to the role of lay 'apostles'.

Catholic schools today are like a shop window for the Church: they should show Catholic life and witness at its most authentic. What should be visible in the shop window? What message are Catholic schools to transmit to their pupils and to the world? Published in September/October edition of FAITH magazine (ISSN 1356-126X), September/October 2007 •...

The infant Christ is often represented holding an orb, representing His kingship over the world. But the notion that the earth is round is older than Christianity and was promoted by Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) and Pythagoras (560 - 480 BC). Most interestingly, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276 - 194 BC) made a very creditable calculation of the circumferen...