New Humanists
Join the hosts of New Humanists and founders of the Ancient Language Institute, Jonathan Roberts and Ryan Hammill, on their quest to discover what a renewed humanism looks like for the modern world. The Ancient Language Institute is an online language school and think tank, dedicated to changing the way ancient languages are taught.
Episodes
79 episodes
A Great Books Monastery | Episode LXXIX
When civilization is crashing down all around you, what do you do? Retreat to the hills, build a monastery, and preserve what you can. That is exactly what Cassiodorus did in the 6th century when he founded the Vivarium, an Italian monastery de...
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Episode 79
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47:20
The Barren Contemplative Life | Episode LXXVIII
This week, Jonathan and Ryan discuss two early medieval selections from Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition, one taken from Gregory the Great, perhaps the most significant pope in the history of Christendom, and another from Alcuin of York,...
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Episode 78
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50:20
How to Train a Pastor | Episode LXXVII
He who teaches the truth finds himself locked in battle against all those who teach falsehood. With what tools will you equip him? That is the question motivating "Education of the Clergy," a 9th century treatise written by one of the great stu...
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Episode 77
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1:05:32
Florence the Heir of Rome | Episode LXXVI
What if the true heir of the Roman Empire was not Rome, but Florence? Over the course of his life and career as a scholar and politician, the great humanist Leonardo Bruni made this argument multiple times, and in a variety of ways. In doing so...
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Episode 76
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1:01:52
The Homer-Industrial Complex | Episode LXXV
The Iliad was more popular than the Odyssey beginning in ancient times, and continued to be all the way up to World War One. Then, something changed. Now the Odyssey leaves the Iliad in the dust in terms of which poem gets assigned more frequen...
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Episode 75
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58:02
Humanism, With or Without God, feat. Eric Adler | Episode LXXIV
For the first time, a collection of Irving Babbitt's and Paul Elmer More's correspondence has been published. Eric Adler, the editor of the collection (titled "Humanistic Letters") joins the show to discuss the collection, New Humanism, and the...
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Episode 74
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1:40:53
Medieval Monastic Humanism | Episode LXXIII
Love for Cicero, attention to rhetorical form, use of pagan wisdom for political thought - these are all hallmarks of the Renaissance humanists. But not their invention. In fact, you find the same things among some medieval thinkers. Jonathan a...
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Episode 73
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52:10
How to Learn Like Thomas Aquinas | Episode LXXII
Thomas Aquinas is also known as the "Angelic Doctor," but he was quite capable of coming down from the heavens and getting practical. In two selections from his work included in Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition, we find some of Thomas' a...
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Episode 72
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51:55
Pagans and Christians, Glory and Piety | Episode LXXI
The things of God belong to a heavenly kingdom. But politics is taken up with what is earthly. Surely, therefore, Christians should keep politics at a distance as much as possible. Right? Even while defending the life of contemplation and retre...
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Episode 71
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1:00:45
Petrarch's Little Dark Age | Episode LXX
Imagine that you are the leading figure in a movement to renew the study and appreciation of classical literature, but you have come to the end of your life and not only has the educational and political situation not improved - it has gotten w...
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Episode 70
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59:51
Liberal Arts for Liberal Hearts | Episode LXIX
Are the liberal arts for everyone? We tend to think that the liberal arts can be helpful and edifying for anyone. But even amidst the humanist enthusiasm for the study of letters, the Renaissance writer Pier Paolo Vergerio denied that the liber...
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Episode 69
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55:24
What is Tyranny? | Episode LXVIII
We think we know what a "republic" is, but what did the Romans mean with their phrase "res publica"? What about the Italian humanists? And how did they distinguish a republic from a tyranny? We take a look at two more chapters from James Hankin...
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Episode 68
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53:00
The Renaissance Politics of Virtue | Episode LXVII
A pandemic. A changing climate. A hopelessly divided country. Christianity threatened by Islam. Universities completely out of touch with normal people. Late medieval Italy was a basket case. All the while, a small group of men was dreaming of ...
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Episode 67
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1:09:32
Christine de Pizan | Episode LXVI
The poet of Joan of Arc, and a notable example of a female writer in the premodern period, Christine de Pizan took a turn at the popular humanist genre of the mirror to princes in her book "The Book of the Body Politics." Jonathan and Ryan take...
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Episode 66
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38:23
Your Children Are Weak | Episode LXV
In his essay "On Educating Children," a follow-up to his denunciation of pedantry, Michel de Montaigne warns that "natural affection makes parents too soft" and incapable of properly disciplining their children, or even of letting their childre...
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Episode 65
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47:46
The Art of Language Teaching, feat. Tim Griffith | Episode LXIV
When Tim Griffith was coaching soccer and reading ancient Roman rhetorical theory, he realized he had stumbled across a pedagogical goldmine. In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan talk with Tim about raising kids as native Latin speakers, the role...
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Episode 64
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1:13:58
Republican Education, feat. Clifford Humphrey | Episode LXIII
We threw off the monarchy... now what? Having established a republic on American soil, the Founding Fathers were faced with the question of how to educate a new generation of people who would protect American liberty. The most underrated of the...
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Episode 63
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1:07:52
Mediocrity Versus Glory in the Renaissance | Episode LXII
Leonardo Bruni was the titan of Renaissance historians and a prolific humanist. In a long letter to an aristocratic Italian woman, Battista Malatesta, he lays out his philosophy of humanistic education, which is meant to help the student achiev...
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Episode 62
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48:05
Does Education Improve the Soul? | Episode LXI
Michel de Montaigne was a native Latin speaker in modern Europe and yet a great innovator in French letters; among other things, he invited the genre known as the essay. His elegant, searching essays are intended to expose the reality of his ow...
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Episode 61
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58:16
Pope Humanist | Episode LX
Aeneas Silvius was an accomplished Renaissance humanist, author of erotic literature, and influential aide to emperors and popes (and an antipope). Then, he became a pope himself. As Pope Pius II, he then added memoirist, urban planner, and ant...
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Episode 60
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46:14
Prince Erasmus | Episode LIX
Jonathan and Ryan turn to a set of selections from the Prince of Humanists himself, Desiderius Erasmus. In Liber Antibarbarorum, Erasmus pillories the precious Christians who refuse to read pagan authors on account of their own squeamish consci...
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Episode 59
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49:33
All Education Is Religious | Episode LVIII
"As only the Catholic and communist know, all education must be ultimately religious education." So argues T.S. Eliot in his essay "Modern Education and the Classics," in which he contrasts three different camps in the world of education: the r...
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Episode 58
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1:05:42
Compassion Versus Classical Antiquity | Episode LVII
In The Greek State, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the Greek polis existed in order to hold the many in slavery so that the Olympian few could give birth to the beautiful Helen known as Greek culture, and that the Greek state had to be periodi...
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Episode 57
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1:10:45
Nietzsche, Homer, and Cruelty | Episode LVI
Why was it that the Greeks, the most humane of all peoples, also possessed such a tigerish lust for blood? Why did the Greeks so delight in Homer's depiction of cruelty and death in the Iliad? That is the question animating Friedrich Nietzsche'...
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Episode 56
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1:16:01
The Mirror for Princes | Episode LV
Thomas Elyot wrote "The Boke named the Governour," the first book about education written in the English language, an outstanding example in the crowded field of Renaissance-era mirrors for princes. The mirrors for princes were works designed t...
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Episode 55
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1:12:32