Melendy Avenue Review 2026.04.15 - Literacy Preserving Monks of the Future

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Melendy Avenue Review 2026.04.15 - Literacy Preserving Monks of the Future<br>A bit of a preview of this year's Birthday Lecture

Peter Berard<br>Apr 15, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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Hello Wednesday readers! Thank you for being here. I’ve done a bit of reading for one of my projects lately. Rather than review those books, I’ll give you a little preview of what I’m working on.

In my review of Rod Dreher’s stupid book a few weeks ago, I talked about my birthday lecture topic for this year. For those unfamiliar with the concept, I’ve been giving an annual lecture, usually in the rough area of intellectual history, at my birthday party for a number of years now. If you like, you can read or listen to most of them. I like doing them, though truth be told they probably help explain why I haven’t gotten a big monograph or novel really done…<br>Anyway, this year, I’m writing about secular-knowledge-preserving utopian communities in fiction. These are fictional communities whose raison d’etre is to preserve scientific and/or philosophical knowledge or practice. They may be religious, and the three I focus on all have heavy overtones of Christian monasticism (one of them being an actual monastery), but the knowledge they preserve is, from our perspective, secular science, philosophy, and knowledge in general.<br>I’m focusing on three novels built around such communities:

The Glass Bead Game , written by Hermann Hesse and published in 1943, which features Castalia, a province set aside for “the life of the mind” in some future Europe.

A Canticle for Leibowitz , written by George M. Miller, Jr. and published in novel form in 1958, which tells of the Order of Leibowitz, a group of monks who preserve knowledge of all kinds in a post-nuclear-war world.

Anathem , written by Neal Stephenson, published in 2008, where in a secondary world with some odd echoes of Earth the Mathic community, dedicated to rationalist philosophy and science, lives isolated from the “saecular” world.<br>Let’s briefly talk about some books I won’t be talking much about in this lecture, but which people ask me about when I tell them this topic.

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