The Ralston College Podcast

Dr Armand D'Angour turns our attention to the lyrical poetry of Horace, as it is placed within the Greek musical and poetic inheritance. With close readings of key odes, he shows us how Horace uses Greek lyric meters to achieve something both rhythmic and aural. Constructed around the themes of love, time, and political life, these poems can be seen as carefully constructed personnae, rather than...

Great works of literature are often regarded with admiration and even intimidation for their role as the lofty subject of scholarly analysis, but these books were not written for the halls of the university alone. These works were composed to be used: insofar as they are able to challenge, guide, and transform the lives of those who come into their possession. The redemptive power of philosophy an...

The great books have never been more accessible, yet we live in a moment increasingly drawn away from them. Their value and transformative power are immediate, but many lack the patience and desire to become truly acquainted with the great minds of antiquity. In this installment of the Career and Life Conversation series, Dr Spencer Klavan joins Ralston College Fellow Connor Livingston for a discu...

In his first lecture at Ralston College, Spencer Klavan offers a reading of Aeschylus' Oresteia that seeks to make sense of the American political landscape. The Furies exemplify the impersonal arithmetic of blood and counter-blood, while the younger gods introduce personal claims, partiality, and the integrity of the individual. When these powers collide with a single human being, we enter into a...

In this lecture, historian Dr Barry Strauss examines Augustus as the architect of Rome's imperial settlement, tracing how a young heir of extraordinary ambition transformed a republic struggling with civil war into an enduring political order. Tracing events from the turmoil following Julius Caesar's assassination to the victory at Actium, the creation of the Pax Romana, and Augustus's claim to ru...

Ralston College Dr President Stephen Blackwood speaks with newly appointed Chancellor Dr Iain McGilchrist about the fate of the universities and their role in the future of civilization. Reflecting on education, tradition, and the conditions necessary for genuine understanding, Dr McGilchrist shares his hope that we can restore places of truth, beauty, and wisdom despite the pressures of  reductio...

In this conversation, Jay Morris speaks with Dr James Bryson about the modern crisis of meaning and the difficulty of remaining spiritually oriented in a world shaped by reductionist accounts of mind, body, and nature. They reflect on the psychological and cultural repercussions of a scientific picture that brackets teleology and final causes, leaving many modern people disembodied, disenchanted,...

In this wide-ranging conversation with students at Ralston College, evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflect on how to live well in the modern world, biologically, philosophically, and spiritually. Moving from Aristotle's De Anima to the ethics of diet and the future of civilization, they explore the body not as an obstacle to overcome but as the very substrate through whi...

In the fourth and final lecture of the 2025 Sophia Lecture series, Dr Bret Weinstein explores how humanity's evolutionary inheritance, both genetic and cultural, has enabled us to navigate an extraordinary range of ecological and social niches. They show that while genes provide the foundational architecture of the mind, culture allows for rapid adaptation and the creation of new possibilities, fr...

In this third lecture, Dr Heather Heying turns to the conditions sufficient for the emergence of sentient consciousness, exploring how life evolves the capacity to perceive, learn, and create. Drawing on the examples of primates, corvids, dolphins, elephants, wolves, and others, she reveals how traits such as long lifespans, extended childhoods, sociality, and play recur in the rare instances wher...

In his lecture Biological Nature to What End?, Dr Bret Weinstein explores the principles of evolution as a lens for understanding human nature, culture, and the pursuit of well-being. Moving from the biotic and abiotic universes to the subtle dynamics of kin and group selection, he reveals how traits emerge, persist, and change across generations. Weinstein challenges the conflation of data collec...

In this opening lecture, Dr Heather Heying invites listeners on an exploration of the deep structures that underlie both scientific inquiry and the human experience of knowing. Moving fluidly between biology, philosophy, and the history of ideas, she challenges inherited beliefs while seeking reconciliation through a broader epistemic lens. Weaving together Darwin's early evolutionary sketches, th...

In this informal and wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Blackwood, Drs Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflect on the formative influences that shaped their intellectual journeys, the role of teachers in cultivating curiosity and courage, the spirit of play as essential to genuine learning, and the challenges of navigating hyper-novelty in the modern world. Throughout the discussion, they ex...

Mari Otsu joins Stephen Blackwood for a deeply personal conversation about her journey through the wounds of materialism, ideology, and spiritual forgetting, and her return to the soul through the beauty of the humanities. Reflecting on her years at NYU and the Grand Central Atelier, Mari speaks of a longing that nothing in the modern, politicized worldview could satisfy, and how she found healing...

Ralston College presents a lecture by Dr Jason Pedicone, distinguished scholar and classicist and the co-founder and President of the Paideia Institute. In this rich and compelling address, Dr Pedicone introduces the subject of philology - the study of language in its historical context - before embarking on a historical tour of philological interventions – times when people have decided to pay pa...

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on St. Augustine's great autobiographical text The Confessions. This talk offers a detailed walk through of Books VII and VIII of Augustine's text in light of Augustine's "abiding preoccupation with the nature of the created order."  Snook explores how Augustine absorbed the  insig...

Douglas Murray, revered cultural critic and author, delivers the highlight of Ralston College's symposium of " Renewal and Renaissance ," a lecture exploring the theme of cultural reconstruction. Delivered from one of the beautiful, stately galleries of Savannah's Telfair Academy, the audience is treated to an intimate address that is both deeply moving and inspiring of hope. Murray's talk begins...

In February 2025, Ralston College hosted a landmark symposium in Savannah, Georgia, bringing together leading thinkers, artists, educators, and students for a searching conversation about the renewal of our shared culture. Over the course of a wide-ranging roundtable, speakers explored the collapse of higher education, the need for sacred space, the conditions for reawakening beauty and truth, the...

"Why We Tell Stories" is a discussion between Greg Hurwitz & Jonathan Pageau which took place on January 31, 2025. In this exchange, two prominent professionals in creative fields discuss the place of passion, productivity, and integrity in the context of their careers, and offer insights which range from guiding, general principles to concrete, practical advice. Over the course of their discussio...

"The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy" is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever. After takinging stock of the "meaning crisis" and our dire need for depth, Dr Blackwood...

In this intimate question and answer session, conducted in March 2024 with the students enrolled in Ralston College's MA in the Humanities, the world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist explores topics that animate the collective intellectual life of Ralston's student body.  Answering questions that range from the metaphysical heights of theology, liturgy, and...

In his final  Sophia Lecture , "Finitude and the Infinite," Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the aspects of finitude...

In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world. McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent,...

This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College's mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself.   Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism. Drawing on analogies from music, na...

A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychiatrist, philosopher, and literary critic, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, on the occasion of Dr McGilchrist's March 2024 visit to Savannah to deliver Ralston College's annual Sophia Lectures. Dr McGilchrist discusses his experience spending time with Ralston College students, his reasons for accepting the College's invi...