New Humanists

Send us Fan Mail When Romulus dies, the city of Rome is riven by ethnic conflict between Romans and Sabines, and class conflict between senators and plebeians. The city cannot agree on its next king; an interregnum ensues. The stalemate is eventually resolved in favor of Numa Pompilius, who is crowned king of Rome in a mysterious, mystical ceremony which almost seems like a human sacrifice. This i...

Send us Fan Mail John Milton's clarion call to educators to "repair the ruins of our first parents" has inspired countless teachers and parents in the classical education movement and beyond. But is Milton really the classical education ally he appears to be? In "On Education" he pays lip service to grammar, logic, and rhetoric - the three components of the Trivium - but h...

Send us Fan Mail Giambattista Vico was a Renaissance Man after the Renaissance, but he was largely forgotten for centuries. As a professor of rhetoric, he often had the occasion to speak and write about the education of the young. We take a look at some of his orations on the topic, which are a mine of profound insight. Vico has some complaints that will sound very familiar, like, "Parents al...

Send us Fan Mail After reading Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a member of the French National Assembly wrote to Burke, asking for more of his analysis on the revolution then underway. In reply, Burke wrote a long letter which included a sustained attack on the preeminent philosopher of the revolution: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This analysis identifies that at the heart of the u...

Send us Fan Mail What if you gathered a bunch of friends, went out to the desert of Arizona, and built the greatest city that the world had ever seen? That is what Romulus does, and what Livy chronicles (except it's not in Arizona). We explore the challenges a founder faces in a startup city, how to fill it with people, and how to unify the inhabitants into one, cohesive people. Livy's A...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second episode of our series about Livy's "Ab Urbe Condita," called "No Republic Was Ever Greater." The story of the founding of Rome continues with the story of twin brothers Romulus and Remus, as they escape certain death in a coup against their grandfather, grow up as shepherd bandits, and stage a counter-coup to return their grandfather to...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first episode of a new series on New Humanists, called "No Republic Was Ever Greater." We are walking through the masterpiece, "Ab Urbe Condita," by Ancient Roman historian Titus Livy and the great commentary on Livy, Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's Discourses. In this episode, we consider the lessons that founders and leaders can...

Send us Fan Mail The late antique and medieval Church saw Virgil as a pagan herald of Christ, due to the seemign messianic prophecies in Eclogue IV. In a 1953 essay titled "Vergil and the Christian World," T.S. Eliot argues that the Christian sympathies in Virgil's poetry go even deeper than that single poem, and in fact suffuse the entire Virgilian corpus. T.S. Eliot's Vergil...

Send us Fan Mail Ælfric's Colloquy is a dialogue between a teacher and his students, written both in Old English and Latin, designed to teach Latin to Anglo-Saxon schoolboys. It is also the earliest record of a (relatively) realistic English-language conversation. In celebration of the Ancient Language Institute's new Old English program, Dr. Colin Gorrie joins Jonathan and Ryan to walk...

Send us Fan Mail Are classical educators dooming their students to poverty? Even back in the early 1800s, that accusation was gaining steam. Edward Copleston was a titanic figure at Oxford's Oriel College in the early 19th century, and inspired John Henry Newman, among others. Facing attacks by utilitarian critics of Oxford, Copleston launched a defense of classical education in his “Reply to...

Send us Fan Mail Is knowledge its own end? Or is it a means to something else? In Discourse Five of his The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman juxtaposes Cato and Cicero as opponents on this question, but Newman’s juxtaposition is not without its own difficulties. Jonathan’s old teacher, Dr. Robert Jackson of the Great Hearts Institute, joins the podcast to talk Newman, knowledge, and educati...

Send us Fan Mail Milton and Shakespeare? Or Homer and Virgil? Why should our students study Greeks and Romans when we have English-language poets, philosophers, and historians worthy to be placed on the same level as the ancients? Maybe because the “ancients” aren’t really so ancient after all…  So argues Thomas Arnold in his defense of the classical curriculum he instituted at Rugby School. Jonat...

Send us Fan Mail The intellectual life can’t just be reading all day. Eventually, you have to sit down and do the work. According to A.G. Sertillanges, the intellectual vocation finds its fulfillment in creation. Jonathan and Ryan wrap up their reading of Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life as they walk through the final three chapters. There was a software problem with recording this week. Apolo...

Send us Fan Mail Jonathan and Ryan continue their discussion of A.G. Sertillanges’s marvelous The Intellectual Life. In chapters 4 -6, Sertillanges touches on, among other things, sleep, the pursuit of wisdom in everyday life, and breadth of study in service of depth.  A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780813206462 Editorial Note: The mention of the “ dies ac...

Send us Fan Mail The French Thomist A.G. Sertillanges, O.P., is most famous for The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. The book is a moving and handy meditation inspired by Thomas Aquinas’ Letter to Brother John about what it will take to devote your life to contemplation. This is the first episode in a three-part series on The Intellectual Life in which Jonathan and Ryan examine...

Send us Fan Mail Who is at the helm of the ship of state? Is the United States doomed to go the way of the Titanic? In the essay “Academic Leadership,” Paul Elmer More expounds on the crucial role that humanistic study plays in cultivating a natural aristocracy that guides and protects the body politic. More, along with Irving Babbitt, was a luminary of the New Humanism movement and an essayist, p...

Send us Fan Mail Was Socrates a Christian? Did Plato meet Jeremiah? Are pagan myths based on garbled versions of the Hebrew prophets? Welcome to Justin Martyr’s First Apology, a plea to the Roman Emperor to stop killing Christians, a philosophical defense of Christianity, and a master class in biblical exegesis. ALI Latin & Greek Fellow Calvin Goligher returns to New Humanists to discuss the p...

Send us Fan Mail Where is Geatland? Beowulf has been taken as a founding poem for England, yet England never appears in the poem. Linguist Colin Gorrie joins Jonathan and Ryan to discuss this heroic and tragic Old English masterpiece, the history of scholarship surrounding the poem, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s titanic contribution to modern understanding of it. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf: htt...

Send us Fan Mail Making humanistic education democratic and freely available was its downfall, at least in the eyes of Albert Jay Nock, as he discusses in The Theory of Education in the United States. Taking a cue as well from Plato’s Republic, Jonathan and Ryan address the apparent tension between the excellence of the tradition and the equalitarian, democratic mores of American life. Should ever...

Send us Fan Mail “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force,” wrote Simone Weil. And yet, she said that Homer’s poem is “the purest and loveliest of mirrors.” How can a poem that revels in the visceral description of death and that chronicles the destruction of a great city be so pure and lovely? Jonathan and Ryan take a look into this epic mirror and into Weil’s justly fam...

Send us Fan Mail The Lost Tools of Learning, a 1947 lecture delivered at Oxford by Dorothy Sayers, was largely ignored at the time and in England until decades later in the United States, when it became a foundation text of the Classical Christian Education movement. Despite being the lecture that launched 1,000 classical schools, Dorothy Sayers appears to undermine the classical tradition and rep...

Send us Fan Mail In one of his many letters to his nephew Lucilius, the famous Stoic philosopher, playwright, and statesman, Seneca, advises his nephew to avoid reading too much. Jonathan and Ryan take up the philosopher’s advice and consider what dangers there are, if any, in reading too much or too widely.  Seneca’s Epistle 2 (free in English): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Luc...

Send us Fan Mail Should teachers teach their pupils what to think? Or how to think? The great English philosopher Michael Oakeshott says it’s not so simple. Students certainly must learn how to think, but can only do so by learning about things in particular - in other words, by learning what to think. Jonathan and Ryan are joined to discuss this excellent Oakeshott lecture on learning and educati...

Send us Fan Mail Long before the New Humanists podcast was born, Irving Babbitt helped found the movement now known as New Humanism. University of Maryland Professor of Classics Dr. Eric Adler, along with his former student (and current ALI Fellow) Katherine Bradshaw, join the podcast to discuss the original New Humanist and what we might stand to gain from him in our debates about education, the...

Send us Fan Mail It is tempting to dismiss T.S. Eliot’s musings on class, society, and education as the complaints of a cranky reactionary. But the great Anglo-American poet is worth reckoning with - if for no other reason than how profoundly he challenges the democratic norms that in the 21st century we simply assume as first principles. Jonathan and Ryan take a look at Eliot’s chapter on educati...