The period of British history from 1837 to 1901 was one in which both Britain and the world were altered remarkably. Changes abounded, in social customs, technology, political and military affairs, and the relations between person and person, citizen and government. Join Thomas Banks on June 30th-July 8th in this six-lecture exploration of the lives of five Victorian men and women who, in diverse ways,…
$120.00–$295.00Price range: $120.00 through $295.00
Individual Price: $120 (Non-Refundable) ***Family Rate for 3 or more students*** Price: $295 (Non-Refundable) The Harry Potter series rivals both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings as the most popular fantasy series of all time. Behind all the hype, film franchises, amusement parks, cos-play, and controversy are stories deeply steeped in the same Literary Tradition as…
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For centuries, writers have drawn inspiration from the literary tradition as well as the living page of nature to shape their literary lives. But what about the composer? How does attention to nature as well as a deep understanding of folktales and myth affect a person whose first language is music? Join Querida Thompson as she guides us through Bedrich…
Every era has to grapple with the eternal showdown of Plato vs. Aristotle. Plato is best-known for his transcendent Forms while Aristotle is forever aligned to the particulars of this world. But what are the universals? And what are the particulars? Is there any harmony of thought for the tutor and his pupil? This dialogue surrounding Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies…
Why has nature been called the first book? And what does it mean to say that we must know nature to know stories? These are the questions we will be exploring in this webinar. It may be that this “book of nature” is the common tongue between us and an older age, and we must recover our eyes to see…
CLASS DESCRIPTION In this class, we will read the whole of Dante's Comedy, with a particularly focus on how Dante used the "great books" of his own day to construct a deeply spiritual and psychological journey, from despair and loss and divisiveness to a happiness so bright and full the human mind cannot take it all in. We will see…
In the face of our current crisis of meaning, many have looked for answers in theology, philosophy, education, even politics. But what if the current crisis we are suffering under is really a crisis of language—one that reaches far beyond concern about the USES of language and instead revolves around the very nature and purpose of language itself? The modern…
“The Inklings”—it is a name we love, and, for many of us, it conjures up a whole cosmos of worlds and imaginings. But when C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield called themselves “the Inklings,” they had something specific in mind. Despite their great differences in temperament and vocation, this circle of friends—which grew to include Charles…
By the time of Lewis Carroll’s death in 1898, Macmillan had printed over 150,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and over 100,000 of its companion Through the Looking Glass. The Alice books remain the most translated into foreign languages after the Bible and Shakespeare. It has become one of the most widely quoted books in the Western world. There were…
“You refer to the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the Force. You believe it’s this boy?” During the production of the original Star Wars series, writer/director George Lucas conceived of a score of other films about the mythological beginnings of his 20th century medieval romance, chronicling the origins of the villainous Darth Vader and his fall…
In 1897, in a small town in the north of France, there ended the life of a young woman known to almost nobody. Her existence had not been marked by any visible greatness or any exceptional act. Within a few decades of her death, a pope would describe her as "the greatest of modern saints" and her exceptional holiness would…
Plato's Republic stands as one of the most influential texts in the literary and philosophical tradition, and many of its key ideas still capture our imaginations. In this webinar, Dr. Anne Phillips will explore the background of the Republic and the flow of its argument, with a particular focus on the metaphorical and allegorical imagery that Plato uses to paint…
Just as the modern reader struggles with the loss of the shared literary, cultural, and imaginative landscape of the literary tradition, so has the modern listener lost touch with the imaginative language of music. C.S. Lewis says that it is the first duty of a reader to read the work like the original audience and this is no less true…
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There are certain historical characters whose lives seem woven out of the stuff of romantic fiction more than attested fact. One such character is the last Catholic queen of Scotland. The life of Mary Stuart spanned a period of religious revolution, war, intrigue, plot, and political drama unparalleled in the history of her country. Join us on Thursday, September 5th to…
Individual Price: $99 (Non-Refundable) ***NEW Family Rate for 3 or more students*** Price: $250 (Non-Refundable) The Harry Potter series rivals both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings as the most popular fantasy series of all time. Behind all the hype, film franchises, amusement parks, cos-play, and controversy are stories deeply steeped in the same Literary Tradition…
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
A Mini-Class by Dr. Jason Baxter Dostoevsky once proclaimed: "Mankind can live without science, and even without bread. But it cannot live without beauty." But what is beauty for Dostoevsky? And why is it so hard for mankind in modernity to find it? This five-part summer series will read Dostoevsky's greatest novel, Brothers Karamazov, within the context of European modernity,…
In the 5th century A.D., the world of the Roman Empire was slowly dying. Its rulers were increasingly weak, literature and philosophy largely exhausted, the cities and provinces impoverished, the ancient religion and civic patriotism atrophied and enfeebled. Goths, Vandals and Huns spilled over the borders. Men all around fearfully anticipated the end of things. And in a middling town…
King Alfred of Wessex, the only sovereign in British history on whom the epithet "Great" has been traditionally bestowed, never ruled over the whole of Great Britain, nor even over the whole of England. Yet after his death he stood in the memory of his nation not only as a great bulwark against their enemies and as a liberal patron…
Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination The myth of modernity is that it has no myth. But, even as we deny its existence, we are being blindly shaped, distorted and even enslaved by the myth of our age. As CS Lewis writes in The Silver Chair, “Of course, the more enchanted you get, the more…
Few things divide us moderns from our ancient forebears as our different ways of understanding the past. We are apt to think of history as a science, the duty of whose practitioners is to describe, with clinical detachment, long ago events "as they actually happened, as plain matters of fact". But in the world of ancient Greece it was not…
(Note: This is a recording of a previously live webinar. To access the recorded video afterwards, log in to your House of Humane Letters account, click "Dashboard," then "Orders," then click the corresponding order. There will be a link that says "View Recording.") “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” From these words began one of…
(Note: This is a recording of a previously live webinar. To access the recorded video afterwards, log in to your House of Humane Letters account, click "Dashboard," then "Orders," then click the corresponding order. There will be a link that says "View Recording." The Slides and the Chat Box are also in Your Account right under View Recording.) Tolkien &…
This webinar taught by Dr. Jason Baxter will introduce (or reintroduce) readers to Dante's Inferno by focusing on how the moral urgency of Dante's collapsing world led him to attempt a daring form of poetry which he thought could save the world. In particular, we'll focus on how Dante's Franciscan understanding of history led him to recycle a Boethian sense…
G.K. Chesterton was among the most popular English writers of the early Twentieth Century. As a novelist, poet, biographer, essayist, and Christian apologist he produced a large and grandly diverse body of writing that has in the past century inspired the admiration of George Orwell, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Franz Kafka, Theodore Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Agatha Christie, Kingsley…
