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 and literature is something we focus on often at the college, but few people today model this power as well as Rod Dreher. In this lecture, we find a potent example of the enduring vitality that exists in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The resulting expanse is an account of literature as something spiritually operative. Dante's poem becomes, in Dreher's telling, a work not only to be interpreted but to be inhabited, as a means by which grace can possess the imagination and heal what argument alone cannot.

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• Inferno

• Purgatorio

• Paradiso

• Augustine's Confessions

• Julian of Norwich

• Benedict XVI

• Thomas Aquinas

• Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

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 tragic cycle that demands a payment which only deepens the debt. Resolution is brought about by Athena and the city that bears her name. Deliberative justice creates a forum in which opposing claims can be weighed without the need for more bloodshed. Vengeance and wrath are transmuted into law that enable the city to live with its past, rather than being ruled by it. Klavan reminds us that scapegoating increases when deliberation is foregone, leaving us prone to ritual violence.

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• Plato's Euthyphro

• Homer's Iliad

• Aeschylus' Oresteia

• The Code of Hammurabi

• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Herodotus

• Aristotle's Poetics

• The Book of Exodus

• Shakespeare's Hamlet

• Abraham Lincoln

• Ken Burns' The Civil War

• Palace of Knossos

• The Acropolis and Parthenon of Athens

• The Theatre of Dionysus

• Barbara Fields

• Eddie Izzard

• Neil Gaiman's the Sandman

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 rule as Rome's "first citizen," Strauss highlights how Augustus secured power by building trust, managing rivals, and reshaping public life through law, ritual, architecture, and art. The talk concludes by asking what is preserved and what is lost when a society exchanges republican freedom for imperial stability, and what the study of ancient leadership can still teach us about prudence, courage, and political responsibility today.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

• Winston Churchill

• William Shakespeare

• Herod the Great

• Homer

• Virgil's Aeneid

• Cicero

• Mark Antony

• Julius Caesar

• Cleopatra

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 reductionism, instrumentality, and mechanistic thought. The conversation also traces prevailing academic narratives such as reduction and computation, which risk a flattening of human life into utility, data, and procedure. McGilchrist distinguishes information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, arguing that wisdom depends on lived experience, sustained attention, and a cultivated disposition toward reality itself.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

• Plato's Seventh Letter

• Aristotle's Political Animals

• Johann Sebastian Bach

• Isaac Newton

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

• Simon Conway Morris

• The Matter with Things

• The Cathedral Builders of the Middle Ages - Alain Erlande-Brandenburg

• Margaret Mead

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, and uncertain about purpose. While acknowledging the genuine success of modern science, Dr Bryson argues that its limits must be faced honestly, especially where questions of meaning, value, and the human heart are concerned.

The discussion then turns to education and the experience of intellectual disinheritance. Dr Bryson reflects on his own formation through a liberal arts education and the humbling discovery of the vast conversation that constitutes the Western tradition. Reading Plato, Dante, and Hegel not as isolated figures but as interlocutors across time, he emphasizes that tradition is a lineage we already inhabit, whether consciously or not. To read historically, he suggests, is not to retreat into the past, but to become aware of the forces shaping our thinking and to take responsibility for them.

The conversation culminates in a meditation on teaching, love, and the philosophical life. Dr Bryson argues that education at its best does not impose conclusions, but kindles desire, granting students permission to pursue the questions that genuinely move them. Drawing on Plato's understanding of eros, he describes philosophy as an act of midwifery, helping ideas come to birth rather than dictating outcomes. In an age marked by spiritual malaise and intellectual fragmentation, the conversation offers a hopeful vision of education as the recovery of orientation, enchantment, and the shared pursuit of wisdom.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

• Plato

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

• Blaise Pascal

• Dante

• Plotinus

• Homer

• Virgil

• Alfred North Whitehead

• Arthur O. Lovejoy

• Aristotle

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte

• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

• Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy

• An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner

• Dante's Paradiso

• The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton

• The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis

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 which consciousness takes form. From lineage and the long arc of life on Earth to nutrition, parenthood, grief, and the challenges of modern medicine, the discussion reveals an integrated vision of human flourishing rooted in both biology and meaning.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

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• Aristotle's De Anima

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, from the construction of monumental cathedrals to the development of shared narratives that transmit knowledge across generations.

Weinstein examines consciousness as a tool for novelty, emphasizing its role in parallel processing, collective problem-solving, and the creation of stories that humanize experience more efficiently than manuals or mechanistic instructions. Humans, he argues, have no fixed niche. Instead, we invent niches through language, shared imagination, and the transmission of culture, feeding back into the evolutionary pressures that continue to shape us.

In the concluding discussion, joined by his wife Dr Heather Heying, Dr Weinstein explores how, by tracing the patterns of evolution and the ways we construct civilizations, we can reflect on the enduring questions of human life, our responsibilities within nature, and the role of beauty, creativity, and imagination in shaping a sustainable future.

• Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris

• Tikal Ruins of Guatemala

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 where sentience has independently evolved. These convergences, she argues, point to universals in the nature of intelligence itself, from cooperative learning to creative problem-solving. Along the way, Heying connects the biological scaffolding of consciousness to broader questions of culture and discovery, reclaiming science as a pursuit not only of logical proof but also of intuitive insight, where the recognition of pattern is inseparable from the apprehension of beauty.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

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• Thomas Henry Huxley
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Spiral Staircase: Sagrada Família, Barcelona, Spain
• Alhambra: Granada, Spain
• Mattias Desmet
• Hannah Arendt
• Henri Poincaré
• Louis Agassiz
• Yanagi Soetsu