Myles Werntz is Director of Baptist Studies and Associate Professor of Theology at Abilene Christian University. With Jessica Hooten Wilson, the two discuss Ivan Illich's scandalous 1971 Deschooling Society. The book argues that mass-enforced public schooling trains students more into producers and automatons than into creative, interdependent learners. Distinguishing between school and education, Illich claims the latter must be done with relational and tangible means, such as the tools of the liberal arts, rather than institutionalized grading and ranking.
Jeff Bilbro talks with Nathan Beacom about the history--and revival--of the Lyceum. Nathan is directing a project whose mission is to "build meaningful communities by providing a space for neighbors to learn together in friendship. The Lyceum offers classes, events, and a shared space to explore great ideas, great deeds, great art, and the questions that affect our life together. In so doing, it seeks to shape citizens and communities well-formed in self-government for the common good." He and Jeff talk about how these events might form their participants intellectually and socially.
Prof. Eric Adler and Jessica Hooten Wilson discuss his book Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today in conversation with Reitter and Wellmon's The Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. Adler creates a lengthier narrative of the humanities that predates the modern version and shows how rooting the identity of the humanities in this story encourages a return to their humanizing character.
Founding Presidents John Mark Reynolds, Stephen Blackwood, and Matthew Smith tell us about why they started colleges from scratch and what gap in the academy they hope to fill. As President Blackwood put it, why keep living in a house with a broken foundation? We need to start over.
Andy Crouch is on the CCCU governing board. In this conversation, he discusses with Jessica Hooten Wilson ways we might innovate to increase the love of liberal arts from children to adults.
Jeff Bilbro talks with Leah Bayens, the dean of the Wendell Berry Farming Program. This program is a collaboration between Sterling College and the Berry Center. Dr. Bayens's PhD is in English, and she has wide-ranging interests in both the humanities and sustainable agriculture. They talk about the program she directs and the challenges and opportunities of uniting liberal arts education with agricultural education.
Jeff Bilbro talks with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. She has also held leadership roles for the MLA, and she is the project director of Humanities Commons. They discuss her recent book Generous Thinking and her current project, available in draft form on her website, Leading Generously.
Jeff Bilbro talks with Chad Wellmon about the arguments in a new book that Chad wrote with Paul Reitter, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. They discuss questions such as: Where did the humanities come from? Why do they always seem to be in crisis? Can we find a hospitable institutional home for humane learning?
Noah Toly talks with Tim Herron and Marquise Dixon, of Degrees of Change and Act Six, about how institutions can better serve first-generation student-leaders.
Rachel Griffis talks with theologian Elizabeth Newman about the importance of leisure in academic study. They discuss the academy’s prioritization of productivity, scarcity mindsets vs. mindsets of abundance, and monastic time. Elizabeth is the author of Divine Abundance: Leisure, the Basis of Academic Culture and Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers.
Noah Toly talks with Greg Jones, Dean of Duke Divinity School and president-elect of Belmont University, about what liberal arts institutions can learn from his new book, Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (with Andrew P. Hogue).
Dr. Matthew Post, Associate Dean of Braniff college of humanities at the University of Dallas, and Dr J. Scott Lee, co-founder and retired Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, discuss the latter's new book Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts.
Angel Adams Parham speaks with John Johnson, co-founder and executive director of the Albertus Magnus Institute (AMI). The AMI is a new, innovative learning community dedicated to liberal arts education focused on great books and great texts, rooted in the Catholic Intellectual tradition. Seminars are taught by the highest caliber teachers and scholars at no cost to participants, who are called fellows. Rather than tuition or fees, the AMI encourages fellows to contribute what they can to support the work. Johnson has a philosophy degree from St. Mary's College of California, Moraga, CA, and a Master’s degree in Theology from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, CA, where his studies focused on the beatific epistemology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He has spoken at Catholic retreats and events across the country and lives in California with his wife and four children.
Dr. Robert Jackson has experience both as a professor in the humanities, working at The King’s College in New York, and experience as the director of Great Hearts Academies—a network of K-12 classical charter schools that emphasize liberal arts education. In this conversation, he talks with Angel Adams Parham about the benefits of taking a K-16 view of liberal arts education.
Jeff Bilbro talks with Phillip Donnelly about his forthcoming book, The Lost Seeds of Learning: The Verbal Arts and Christian Faith. Professor Donnelly serves as Director of the Great Texts Program in the Honors College at Baylor University. His research focuses on the historical connections between philosophy, theology, and imaginative literature, with particular attention to Renaissance literature and the reception of Classical educational traditions. He also works with classical school educators in the K-12 setting.
Who are the liberal arts for? It is often assumed that liberal arts education is for the privileged, for those who have little need of a practical skill or trade. But this view dismisses much experience which shows that the least advantaged are often the most strongly impacted by liberal arts education and have the most to gain from it. In this conversation we hear from Dr. Emily Auerbach who has spent nearly twenty years engaging in liberal arts education with the least advantaged, and Dr. Francis Su, who has mentored and co-authored with a young man who has found his voice in high level mathematics, despite being imprisoned. Odyssey Project Website Odyssey Project Documentary Mathematics for Human Flourishing Math Prize Shared with Christopher Jackson
Rachel Griffis talks with John Rocha about the role of sports in a liberal arts education. They discuss the importance of the body in education and the liberating effects of incorporating all aspects of a person in learning. John is Head of School at Ozark Catholic Academy in Northwest Arkansas.
2020 has exacerbated longstanding pressures facing many institutions dedicated to liberal arts formation: ongoing technological developments, economic shifts, and political divisions have been intensified by the events of this year. The Liberating Arts has focused on how institutions of higher education might respond to these realities, but many magazines are seeking related paths forward as they seek to foster humane, liberating conversations. We invited editors at three periodicals—Comment Magazine, The Hedgehog Review, and Plough Quarterly—to dialogue with Jeff Bilbro about their perspectives on these questions. B.D. McClay, Peter Mommsen, and Anne Snyder discuss how they seek to shape thoughtful conversations in an age where crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and social injustice more often elicit soundbites, clickbait, and memes.
Reading guru Karen Swallow Prior (author of On Reading Well) interviews the ‘Neil Postman of our age’ Sven Birkerts (author of The Gutenberg Elegies) about how digital technologies can deform our freedom and our humanity. But also how reading may counter such malformation!
We hear quite a bit about applying what we learn to make it relevant. However, such conversations are usually aimed at the use of certain disciplines. Artist Makoto Fujimura counters these assertions by describing education as a creative activity. All truly human activity should be creating beauty. His new book Art and Faith forms the basis of this conversation between Jessica and Mako.