What if the life you long for is formed one teaspoon at a time? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with classicist, writer, and homeschooling mother Nadya Williams about the small patterns that fill a life: reading aloud on the couch, gathering friends around books and snacks, welcoming children into imperfect homes, and writing in the margins of family life. 

Together they explore motherhood, Christian human dignity, education, AI, and the hope of building a humane culture through local, faithful, ordinary practices. For mothers who feel stretched thin and are hungry for wisdom, this conversation offers a gentle invitation to begin with one small good thing.

About the Guest
Nadya Williams (PhD in Classics, Princeton University) is a homeschool mom, writer, and editor based in Ashland, Ohio, where she is Interim Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023), Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024), and Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan Academic, 2025). She is Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy, where she hosts the Christians Reading Classics Podcast. She is also a Contributor at Christianity Today, a Contributing Editor at Front Porch Republic and Providence Magazine, and Featured Author at Fairer Disputations. She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio.

Substack | https://nadyawilliams.substack.com/ and https://badhomeschoolers.substack.com/
Website | https://www.nadyawilliams.com/
Writing at The Dispatch | https://thedispatch.com/author/nadya-williams/
Christians Reading Classics Podcast | https://mereorthodoxy.com/christians-reading-classics
X | https://x.com/NadyaWilliams81

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok |  https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook |  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What if the books we read aloud, the walks we take, and the names we learn for the world around us are not small extras, but central ways of forming a life? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Jesse Hake, Director of ClassicalU at Classical Academic Press, about reading as a family practice, literature as a companion in moral formation, and the quiet power of naming the places we inhabit. Their conversation moves from The Lord of the Rings and Dickens to creek stomping, wildflowers, classroom liturgies, and the simple discipline of calling one’s father. For parents and teachers seeking humane, practical ways to cultivate wisdom, attention, and delight, this episode offers a hopeful vision of education as shared life.

Jesse reminds us that classical education is not merely a curriculum or a set of ideas. It is a way of receiving the world with love and giving that love to others through conversation, memory, making, and place. Reading aloud, walking attentively, and creating beautiful things together become patterns that nourish families, classrooms, and communities.

About the Guest
Jesse Hake is director for the ClassicalU parent and teacher training platform at Classical Academic Press, where he has served since 2019. Before that, he was Principal for seven years at Logos Academy, a classical Christian school in downtown York, PA. Jesse holds a BA in history from Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and a Master of Letters in history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He has taught history, literature and theology at middle school, high school and college levels and currently teaches as an adjunct professor in the Messiah University honors program. He enjoys writing as well, with articles in The Christian Century, Front Porch Republic and his own essay newsletter at Copious Flowers. He lives with his wife and three children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Guest Links
ClassicalU | https://classicalu.com/
Copious Flowers | https://copiousflowers.substack.com/
ClassicalU on Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/classicalupage
ClassicalU on LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/classicalu/

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What if learning to see another person clearly is one of the first steps toward wisdom? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with portrait painter Catherine Prescott about attention, beauty, vocation, and the dignity of the human person. Catherine’s life and work invite us into one of the central hopes of classical Christian education, to recover a way of seeing the world that is truthful, humane, and alive to goodness. Through stories of childhood, artistic formation, resistance to abstraction, conversion, motherhood, and the long labor of portrait painting, this conversation reminds parents, teachers, and students that education is not merely the transfer of information. It is the formation of vision, desire, patience, and love.

Catherine reflects on the mystery of interior life, the discipline of looking without reducing or invading, and the way darkness, honestly faced, can make us reach for the light. Her story offers a deeply human picture of what it means to compose a life around beauty, truth, family, work, and faith.

About the Guest
Catherine Prescott is a painter known for her expressive portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including twice in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which also holds one of her paintings in its permanent collection. In 2018, she completed the official portrait of Governor Tom Corbett for the Pennsylvania State Capitol. Catherine has exhibited widely in museums and galleries and has received numerous honors from organizations such as the Portrait Society of America and the Salmagundi Club. She taught painting and drawing at Messiah College for twenty years and continues to teach in Gordon College’s Orvieto, Italy program. She lives and works in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Guest Links:
Catherine Prescott Paintings | https://www.prescottpaintings.com/
Catherine Prescott Bio | https://www.prescottpaintings.com/bio

Connect with the Humanitas Institute:
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does the body reveal about vocation and our search for communion? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Alicia Coyle about Theology of the Body, motherhood, feminine formation, chastity, education, and the slow work of composing a life around gift rather than competition. Their conversation moves from John Paul II and Edith Stein to Little Women, Aristotle, Mary at Cana, and the daily patterns of homeschooling, prayer, reading, and family life. For parents seeking a wiser way through cultural confusion, Alicia offers a thoughtful vision of embodiment as something neither limiting nor abstract, but deeply human, practical, and full of invitation.

Together, Christine and Alicia consider how ideas become incarnate through teachers, friendships, families, and habits. They ask what it means to see the body as meaningful, how women and men can offer distinct gifts without rivalry, and why formation begins not with rules alone, but with anthropology, wonder, and the truth of the person made in the image of God. 

About the Guest
Alicia Coyle is a wife and a mother of four young girls. She currently homeschools. She did her undergraduate in philosophy and theology at the Templeton Honors College, and especially enjoyed thinking about Theology of the Body and the many related topics. She has taught in the classical education world and received her Masters in Theology from the Augustine Institute.

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does it mean to grow up classical, and how can the great books help form a young person’s moral imagination? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Olivia Reardon, a graduating senior at Messiah University, about literature, ethical formation, and the classical Christian classroom. Drawing from Olivia’s senior honors thesis and her upcoming ClassicalU course, Journeying with the Great Books: Ethical Formation in the Classical Christian Classroom, the conversation explores how stories give students language for their deepest questions, offer “handholds” for living in a broken world, and invite readers to return again and again as they grow in wisdom.

Together, Christine and Olivia reflect on reading as a relational and formative act, one that happens best in a community of trust, conversation, and shared attention. Olivia offers the images of mirrors, windows, and doors as a way of understanding how books help students see themselves, encounter others, and enter experiences beyond their own. The conversation also considers the breadth of the Great Conversation, not as a narrow inheritance for a few, but as a living tradition shaped by many voices and offered for the formation of all.

About the Guest
Olivia Reardon earned her B.A. in English with a concentration in literature and minors in Education and Dance from Messiah University in 2026. Olivia grew up in Maryland with her parents and four siblings where she received a Classical, Christian education first through a homeschool co-op and then at a full-time private school. Olivia now teaches Upper School Rhetoric and Literature at Rockbridge Academy, a Classical, Christian School in Crownsville, Maryland. When Olivia is not teaching, she reads abundantly (some of her favorite authors are Fyodor Dostoyevsky, C. S. Lewis, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro), teaches dance at a local studio, and enjoys the beach, trying new ice cream flavors, and competition with friends and family.  

Guest Links
Messiah University Honors Program | https://www.messiah.edu/honors-program/
Reardon’s ClassicalU Course releases Jun 9, 2026 | https://classicalu.com/course-finder

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does beauty have to do with the spaces where we learn, teach, worship, and gather? In this shared bonus episode of Composed and Forged, Christine Perrin speaks with Brian Williams about Templeton Hall, the home of the Templeton Honors College, and the deep work of making a place that feels whole, hospitable, and human. Their conversation moves from architecture and furniture to poetry, asking how beauty forms us before we can fully explain what it has done. This is an episode about attention, creation, community, and the grace of places that help us breathe more deeply and live more faithfully.

Brian reflects on the making of Templeton Hall at Eastern University as an act of stewardship, one that honors the old while creating room for students and faculty to dwell together in the pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful. Christine and Brian consider why beauty is not a luxury, why material places matter to Christian formation, and how the experience of a beautiful space can awaken desire for God. The episode closes fittingly with Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” a poem of praise for the dappled, particular, and creaturely world.

References and Links
Templeton Honors College | https://templeton.eastern.edu/
Templeton Hall | https://templeton.eastern.edu/life-community/templeton-hall
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building | https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028
Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World | https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Will-Save-World-Ideological/dp/1610171004
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot | https://www.amazon.com/Idiot-Penguin-Classics-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/014044792X
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy | https://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Joy-Shape-Early-Life/dp/0062565435
Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove | https://angelicopress.com/products/the-descent-of-the-dove?srsltid=AfmBOop0_4ZZscz8U6o_ldEPhSYpkPOBsrJotPNumtbWjmzkJWtypzrJ
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” | https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty” | https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-beauty

Connect with the Humanitas Institute

Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does it mean to compose a life through Sabbath rest, faithful work, and the patient practice of language? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel, a poet, translator, teacher, and director of the English program at Shalem College in Jerusalem, about the patterns that have shaped her life as a mother, writer, citizen, and friend. Their conversation moves from a childhood formed by trust and moral responsibility, to the weekly reset of Shabbat, to the strange and beautiful labor of translating the Book of Job. Along the way, Annie reflects on Hebrew, Palestinian Arabic, friendship across fracture, and the need to remain questioning without becoming cynical.

The conversation also touches on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Little Virtues,” Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, the Ethics of the Fathers, and the enduring hope that virtues can persist even in periods of historical grief and uncertainty.

About the Guest
Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel is a teacher, translator and poet who lives in Jerusalem and works at Shalem College. She has translated the Book of Job, among other poetry, and understands the way we live and befriend people inside of language. She describes the habits of language acquisition and its yield along with many other patterns that have shaped her life as a mother, writer, and citizen.

Guest Links
Kantar’s full-length collection of poems, Means To Be Lucky | https://www.poets-traitors.com/means-to-be-lucky
Translation from the Hebrew of With This Night, The final collection of poetry that Leah Goldberg published in her lifetime |  https://bookshop.org/p/books/with-this-night-leah-goldberg/b76aceb9230cbea9
Translation of the Book of Job as part of Koren Publishers’ new translation of the Hebrew bible | https://korenpub.co.il/en/products/the-english-koren-tanakh-large-size-magerman-edition 

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute

Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does it mean to build a culture of intellectual friendship, one shaped by books, music, meals, memory, and shared attention? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with historian and colleague, James LaGrand, about the habits that form students and teachers into a genuine community of learning. Their conversation moves from violin lessons and hymns to Augustine, Dante, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Tyehimba Jess, and the Sunday dinner table. Together they consider education not merely as competence or achievement, but as the patient formation of persons who can receive beauty, honor the past, and seek the good in company with others.

LaGrand describes his work in Messiah University’s Honors Program as the building and protecting of a culture, rather than the management of a program. Through seminars, shared meals, walks, tea, concerts, trips to Gettysburg, and the reading of great texts aloud, he invites students into patterns of attention that join the life of the mind to friendship and delight. The episode closes with a tribute to Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, and with the quiet image of a grandmother’s Sabbath table as a pattern for a life of hospitality and care.

About the Guest
James LaGrand is an American historian and the Director of the Honors Program and Professor of American History at Messiah University. He has published a monograph with University of Illinois Press and essays in Quillette, Public Discourse, Patheos, The Federalist, History News Network, The Cresset, and Pennsylvania History, among other publications. He has spent his seven-year tenure as director practicing the example of his grandmother and mother in setting the table in order to draw students and faculty together for conversation about books and life that build relationships.

Guest Links
Messiah University Honors Program| https://www.messiah.edu/honors-program/
Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75 | https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p072963
The Black Intellectual Tradition and the Great Conversation  | https://classicalu.com/course/f1d74d43-befa-4030-8fbc-185947a9617c 

Mentioned in the Episode

Olio by Tyehimba Jess | https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/olio
Tyehimba Jess | https://www.tyehimbajess.net/books.html

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What does it take to remain fully human in an age of distraction? In this conversation, Christine Perrin speaks with Dr. Jeanne Schindler about attention, technology, homeschooling, civic life, and the quiet disciplines that help us fight for what is real. Together they consider how modern devices flatten experience, weaken our sense of place, and make presence harder to practice, while also pointing toward a better way, one rooted in community life, embodied friendship, serious thought, and shared public spaces. This is a conversation about recovering the habits that make a human life deep, relational, and truly lived.

Drawing from her own intellectual formation, Dr. Schindler reflects on childhood influences, her shift from history to political theory, her decision to leave tenure and devote herself more fully to home and family, and the rewards of lifelong learning through homeschooling. She and Christine also explore AI, the limits of technology, the strain placed on civic discourse, and why restlessness should not always be medicated by screens, but instead received as a summons to seek truth, communion, and a richer form of life.

About the Guest
Dr. Jeanne Schindler is a Fellow of the John Paul II Institute. Until 2013 she was an associate professor at Villanova University. Dr. Schindler’s intellectual interests are interdisciplinary, integrating philosophy, theology, and political science. She has lectured and published in a variety of areas, including Catholic social thought and democratic theory. She edited Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (2008) and co-edited with her husband, D.C. Schindler, A Robert Spaemann Reader (Oxford University Press, 2015). Dr. Schindler is a homeschooling mother of three children.

Guest Links & Resources
The Postman Pledge
James Howard Kunstler TED Talk
Amusing Ourselves to Death
 The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan
 The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet

Connect with the Humanitas Institute
Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

What makes a place, a school, or a daily life feel truly human? In this conversation, Christine Perrin and Timothy Patitsas explore beauty first living, the “quality without a name” described by Christopher Alexander, and the patterns that help people feel at home, at ease, and fully alive. Together they consider paper routes, classrooms, liturgical seasons, friendship, motherhood, teaching, and the built world, asking how living patterns form the soul and why beauty is not an ornament to life but one of its deepest truths. This episode is an invitation to notice the forms of life that nourish wonder, awaken desire for the good, and help us belong more deeply to the world.

Their conversation moves from childhood memory to architecture, pedagogy, eros, ritual, and community. Along the way, Timothy reflects on the difference between potent information and quality information, the role of stories in shaping desire, and the kinds of educational practices that help students encounter truth not only analytically, but with their whole persons.

About the Guest

Timothy Patitsas is Assistant Professor of Ethics at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary in Boston, Massachusetts. Between 2007 and 2019 he directed the annual seminary pilgrimage to Constantinople, Mount Athos, Greece, and the Holy Land. In 2019 he published The Ethics of Beauty, which has sold more than eight thousand copies. In 2023 he co-directed and co-produced “Amphilochios: Saint of Patmos,” a documentary short which became an official selection at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival.

More from our Guest

Hellenic College Holy Cross | Timothy Patitsas, PhD
The Ethics of Beauty
Amphilochios: Saint of Patmos
Hellenic College Holy Cross on Instagram

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

Connect with the Humanitas Institute 

HumanitasInstitute.org
X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute