About Virtue and Wonder

We are Joshua and Hannah Centers. We live in rural Tennessee with our three children, and we spend our evenings doing something that would have been completely ordinary a hundred years ago: reading great books aloud to our kids.

We started Chapter House because we believe the old stories still work. Æsop’s fables still teach children about human nature. Greek mythology still fills a child with wonder. The tales of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Odysseus still shape moral imagination the way they have for centuries. These books have not lost their power. We have simply stopped giving them to our children.

Chapter House publishes beautiful editions of these classic books for young readers, paired with essays that explain why the stories matter and how to use them with your family. We are launching in spring 2026 with four box sets spanning the great literature of Western civilization, from Æsop to the discovery of the Americas.

Virtue and Wonder is where we think out loud about the ideas behind what we do.

Some of what we write here is practical. How to read aloud to children of different ages. How to handle a reluctant reader. Which books to start with and why. How to build a family reading life that actually holds together on a busy Tuesday.

Some of it is more philosophical. Why cultural literacy matters more than test scores. Why the purpose of education is the formation of the soul, not the preparation of an employee. Why the old books deserve a place at your kitchen table.

All of it comes back to two words: Virtue and wonder.

We believe that wonder is the spark that lights a child’s desire to learn, and that virtue is what gives that learning its direction and its weight. The great tradition of Western education understood this for thousands of years. Aristotle wrote about it. The Church Fathers preached it. The American founders built a republic on the assumption that it was true. We are not inventing anything new. We are trying to hand down what we received.

We are not academics. We are not credentialed experts. We are two parents who read to our kids every night and have seen what happens when the right story lands in the right soul at the right time. We fail at this regularly and are trying anyway.

If that sounds like you, subscribe. We are glad you are here.

Virtus et Miraculum,
Joshua and Hannah