Forming Souls - Not Just Minds with Heidi White

Classical Christian education often talks about forming students to love what is true, good, and beautiful. But how does that formation actually happen?

In this episode of BaseCamp Live, Davies Owens is joined by author, educator, and podcaster Heidi White to explore the formative power of stories. Heidi shares how literature shaped her own life and explains why great books do far more than communicate ideas or teach moral lessons. They awaken desire, give children models worthy of imitation, and help them wrestle with some of the deepest questions of what it means to be human.

Drawing from her book The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life, Heidi explores the tension between what we want and what we know we ought to do, and how that struggle appears again and again in great literature, Scripture, and our own lives.

Davies and Heidi also get practical about reading with children. How much should parents explain? Should we protect children from darker moments in stories? And how can we ask questions that invite genuine thought rather than turning every book into another moral lesson?

This conversation is an invitation to see education differently: not simply as the transfer of information, but as the formation of loves, desires, imagination, and ultimately, the human soul.

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