The Faber Institute is committed to the “awakening” of souls in an age when the existence of the soul and its particular capacities and formidable powers is being overlooked.
We do this by putting people in touch with the sources of depth and vision within themselves.
We do this by introducing them to and then teaching them how to read the profound texts, and how to meet the profound people, of our articulate human past.
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular, the texts we mean are the holy Scriptures and our particular care to learn how to know Jesus Christ, but we also mean theologians and philosophers and mystics, and the saints and poets and painters and writers.
We do this through the central habits of the Institute: spiritual direction, spiritual conversation (in person but also through written letters), through the demanding intellectual formation of The Night School and The Faber Sessions, and through Retreats (half-day or full-day or multiple days).
We do this through the Director’s extensive research in the texts of the Great Tradition, sharing the fruits of his research in the monthly publication of the Letters to Peregrinus; in classes taught; in talks given; in books written; and in retreats built and directed.
We do this by an unceasing habit of going out to seek friendship, and to establish them artfully, with people religious or non-religious or formerly religious, with people of all ages, with people from all Christian denominations, and with people of different cultures.
We do all of this within the horizon of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” Church (what has been called “mere Christianity”), and for the sake of God’s deepest hopes for the common good of all.
The Faber Institute, founded in Portland, OR on 1 October 2014, is about awakening people as God does it, showing them how to intensify and to sustain inner alertness (the virtues) and training their capacities to recognize and to serve the highest good of persons who find and develop their lives within the natural world (creation) and the human world (society and culture).
We train them to become quicker to recognize and to distinguish (discernment) the false modes of being a person, persuading them to choose, and to trust, the long-tested and true paths to becoming fully alive, so that they joyfully accept their responsibilities for the common good of all – becoming “God-like” after the pattern of Jesus Christ.
produced in 2016 by Brother PDX
