Douglas Murray, revered cultural critic and author, delivers the highlight of Ralston College’s symposium of “Renewal and Renaissance,” a lecture exploring the theme of cultural reconstruction.

Delivered from one of the beautiful, stately galleries of Savannah’s Telfair Academy, the audience is treated to an intimate address that is both deeply moving and inspiring of hope.

Murray’s talk begins with the sober reflection that civilizations are mortal and share the fragility of life. He recounts how the loss of confidence experienced after the catastrophes of the World Wars led to the development of modernism, postmodernism and finally deconstructionism. The lecture then takes a more optimistic turn as Murray confidently asserts that after decades of deconstruction, especially in the field of higher education, we are now entering an era of reconstruction. He explains how this process of cultural renewal can come about through both the opportunities afforded by technology and the process of going back into the great literary treasures of the past, finding our place amongst these works and adding to them.

Murray shares his love of books, describing himself as “not only a bibliophile but something of a bibliomaniac,” and expresses how literature, and especially poetry, can ground us in the world and make us feel that we are never alone for we will always have “friends on the shelves.” Traversing through Byron, Gnedich, Stoppard, Auden and Heaney, Murray recounts three powerful stories that reveal the lengths certain individuals will go to recover, preserve and transmit our cultural treasures.

The talk was followed by a captivating Q&A session which ranged from the current status of poetry to the topics of writing, war and human nature.

As part of the stirring introduction to the lecture from Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, soprano Kristi Bryson performed Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga, accompanied on the piano by Ralston alumna and fellow, Olivia Jensen. A splendid performance showcasing perfectly the ability of culture to transcend the difficulties of life through the power of beauty. A reminder for us all of exactly what it is that we are seeking to preserve and renew.

Mr Murray's books, including his most recent, are available here: https://douglasmurray.net.

To watch the first conversation of the day—the roundtable from the Ralston College Renewal and Renaissance Symposium, featuring multiple speakers discussing the future of education, culture, and human flourishing—click here.

In February 2025, Ralston College hosted a landmark symposium in Savannah, Georgia, bringing together leading thinkers, artists, educators, and students for a searching conversation about the renewal of our shared culture.

Over the course of a wide-ranging roundtable, speakers explored the collapse of higher education, the need for sacred space, the conditions for reawakening beauty and truth, the integral importance of literature, music and architecture, and the crucial role of the young in rebuilding a meaningful culture that can inspire and endure.

This conversation is not an academic exercise in abstraction. It is the practical work of preservation—of remembering what the world has forgotten, and of laying foundations for what must come next.

The roster of speakers is as follows:

• Stephen Blackwood: Why we are on the verge of renaissance
• James Orr: Why America is ready for change
• David Butterfield: Why colleges are the institutions to build
• James Hankins: Why the Italian Renaissance emerged
• Joseph Conlon: Why learning languages is essential
• Gregg Hurwitz: Why literature must resonate outside academia
• Jonathan Pageau: Why renewal requires in-person, communal remembrance
• Samuel Andreyev: Why music needs to know its tradition to thrive
• Christian Sottile: Why we need beautiful architecture
• Mari Otsu: Why Ralston College was the place that changed my life

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

•  Sir Isaac Newton
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Friedrich Hölderlin’s Patmos
• Martin Heidegger
• John of Patmos, a figure traditionally identified with John the Apostle or John the Evangelist
• Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
• The Cambridge Five
• Sir Niall Ferguson
• Saint Benedict of Nursia
• Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus
• Charlemagne
• Alcuin of York
• Walter de Merton
• Gaius Marius
• Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Paradiso – the third and final part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy
• Francesco Petrarca
• Cola di Rienzo
• Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi
• Livy (Titus Livius)
• Homer
• Plato
• Plutarch
• “JD Vance States the Obvious About Ordo Amoris” – in First Things, by James Orr
• Pythagoras
• Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus
• Charles Dickens
• Alfred Hitchcock
• William Shakespeare
• Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE – 17 CE), known as Ovid
• Albert Camus – The Stranger
• James M. Cain – The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Pope Julius II
• The Bible
• Ezra Pound, quote from ABC of Reading (1934)
• Professor Jeffrey Eley
• Mark C. McDonald
• The Medici Family
• Gian Giorgio Trissino
• Andrea Palladio
• Otto Wagner
• The Black Paintings (Las Pinturas Negras) by Francisco Goya
• Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
• Peter Paul Rubens

 

“Why We Tell Stories” is a discussion between Greg Hurwitz & Jonathan Pageau which took place on January 31, 2025. In this exchange, two prominent professionals in creative fields discuss the place of passion, productivity, and integrity in the context of their careers, and offer insights which range from guiding, general principles to concrete, practical advice.

Over the course of their discussion with each other and with the students, they field questions about the artistic process; about the public attention they’ve received for their work; about the lessons they’ve learned; and about their impression of Ralston College and its place in a broader context of cultural and educational renewal. 

This event was part of Ralston College’s Career and Life conversations, a series of informal Friday-afternoon discussions for students enrolled in the MA in the Humanities. To apply to this program, please visit our website: www.ralston.ac/apply.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Aristotle

• Dante Alighieri

• DC Comics’ Batman series

• The Book of Genesis

• Jordan B. Peterson

• Stephen King

• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

• Rashomon (1950; dir. Akira Kurosawa)

• Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912) 

• Sigmund Freud

• Carl Rogers

• Jackson Pollock

• Pablo Picasso

• Lucile Ball

• Groucho Marx

• Sammy Davis Jr.

• James Patterson

• John Grisham 

• Dr James Orr

• Dr Douglas Hedley

• Douglas Murray

• Ben Shapiro

• William Shakespeare

• Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code

• Hamilton: An American Musical 

• Harry Potter series 

• William Goldman

 

“The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy” is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever.

After takinging stock of the “meaning crisis” and our dire need for depth, Dr Blackwood meditates on the first great insight of the Consolation: that the remedies of the self must emerge from the self. The complex and intricate structures and patterns of Boethius’ work are powerful, beautiful, and therapeutic precisely because its harmonies reflect the reality of both the world and the world within.

Both the order of the cosmos and the order of the self unfold, for the reader of the Consolation, by way of the book’s carefully calibrated pedagogical dimension. Its therapies for the soul consist of tenderness and tough love alike, because the sight, insight, and assent that it seeks to instill cannot be induced by any other means. Instead, the liberating power of consciousness to which this work so insistently points depends on the innate freedom that we all possess—the very freedom to which the example of Boethius endures, to this day, as a singular witness.

Learn more at www.ralston.ac.

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
• The Consolation of Philosophy, H. F. Stewart & E. K. Rand, trans. (Loeb, 1918)
• Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Dante Alighieri
• Saint Thomas Aquinas
• Sir Thomas More
• Queen Elizabeth I
• C. S. Lewis
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• Peter Abelard
• Plato, Timaeus
• Gospel of John
• Saint Augustine of Hippo
• Robert Crouse
• Aristotle

 

In this intimate question and answer session, conducted in March 2024 with the students enrolled in Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities, the world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist explores topics that animate the collective intellectual life of Ralston’s student body. 

Answering questions that range from the metaphysical heights of theology, liturgy, and religious life to the tangible depths of scientific inquiry and medical progress, Dr McGhilchrist challenges his interlocutors to think deeper about the relationship between mind and matter, science and religion, and, ultimately, humanity and the divine. 

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

• Albert Einstein

• Aristotle

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Meister Eckhart

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Thomas Traherne

• Rumi

• Henry Moore

• Blaise Pascal

• St. Augustine

• William Shakespeare, King Lear; The Merchant of Venice; Hamlet; The Tempest

• Metrodorus of Lampsacus 

• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

• G.W.F. Hegel

• Alwyn Lishman

• St. Francis of Assisi 

• Plotinus

• Thomas Edison

• St. Gregory of Nyssa

• Carl Jung

• Glenn Gould

 

In his final Sophia Lecture, “Finitude and the Infinite,” Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the aspects of finitude and infinitude.

Beginning with the English Romantic poets, McGilchrist shows how these artists resisted the habits of perception that can be associated with the brain’s left hemisphere. This part of the brain is adept at rendering, representing, and modeling, but it does so at the cost of simplifying whatever it constructs. Poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Blake strove to remove the film of familiarity from their vision. For them, imagination was the power that made intuitive connections and integrative “leaps,” giving access to a richer, unbounded reality not subject to the strictures of reductive categories.

In dialogue with physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians, McGilchrist ultimately shows how the vision of the world offered by the Romantic poets lays claim to the infinite and the eternal. For these artists, eternity is “adverbial”: it is a way of being, a manner, and a modality. McGilchrist convincingly shows us that we, too, can decline to see the world through categories that are measurable, predictable, and countable—but finally lifeless; like the poets whom he takes as his main interlocutors in this lecture, we can, instead, open ourselves to reality’s boundless, vital, and infinite character.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• William Wordsworth - Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria
• Percy Bysshe Shelley - A Defence of Poetry
• Max Scheler
• William Blake
• Richard Feynman
• James A. Shapiro
• Denis Diderot
• Barbara McClintock
• William James
• Albert Einstein
• Leonhard Euler
• William Wilson Morgan
• Richard Feynman
• The Ancient of Days (William Blake, 1794, watercolor etching)
• Nicholas of Cusa - De Docta Ignorantia
• Jason Padgett
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Galileo Galilei
• David Hilbert
• Henri Bergson
• Richard Wagner
• Isaac Luria - Lurianic Kabbalah
• Edward Nelson
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Eugène Minkowski
• Heraclitus
• Jordan Peterson
• Zeno of Elea
• John Milton
• John Keats
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Martin Heidegger
• Tao-te Ching
• William Blake - “The Tyger”
• Emily Dickinson
• Marianne Moore
• Robert Browning - “Two in the Campagna”
• Bhagavad Gita
• Peter Cook
• John Polkinghorne
• Mary Midgley
• René Descartes
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
• J. B. S. Haldane
• Lee Smolin
• Eugene Koonin
• Hildegard of Bingen - The Choirs of Angels
• Christ Pantocrator and Signs of the Zodiac
• C. S. Lewis
• Johannes Kepler
• Jesus

In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world.

McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent, and predictable universe.

Drawing from disciplines as disparate as physics, mathematics, biology and art, McGilchrist shows that asymmetry is not simply a principle of vitality, harmony, and beauty. McGilchrist argues that asymmetry is primary, a reality that is prior to symmetry and which forms the basis of the very symmetries in nature and the arts to which it gives rise. The dynamism which results from the drive to balance and to resist balance is at the root of the vigor of natural systems, the beauty that they embody, and which the arts then reflect.

With examples ranging from the elegance of the golden ratio to the structure of the human brain, McGilchrist’s lecture offers a fresh perspective on the nature of patterns in complex systems and human creations. His work invites us to search for wholeness, harmony, and connection from a set of starting points which are as surprising as they are fruitful; as always, he challenges us to see our world in new—and newly unified—ways.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Johann Sebastian Bach
• John Donne - “Holy Sonnet 7: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins - “Carrion Comfort”
• Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations with Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, and Other Physicists of Our Time
• Alexander Pope - “The Rape of the Lock”
• Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary
• Pierre Curie
• Chien-Shiung Wu
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Aesop
• Heraclitus
• Democritus
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Louis Pasteur
• Rong Li & Bruce Bowerman - “Symmetry breaking in biology”
• Arthur Koestler
• Aristotle
• Oliver Sacks
• Thomas Holstein
• Tim Crow
• Onur Güntürkün
• Jane Clark & Daniel Simons (Christopher Chabris) - Gorillas in Our Midst
• Jonathan Rowson
• Alastair McIntosh
• Richard Dawkins
• Nikolaj Nikolaenko
• Luciano Laurana
• Giorgio Martini - Ideal City
• Raphael - The School of Athens
• Andrea Palladio
• William Blake - “The Tyger”
• Theodosius II
• Christ Pantocrator
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• John P. McGovern
• William Osler
• William Alwyn Lishman
• William Shakespeare - King Lear
• John Cleese
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Sir Roger Scruton

This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College’s mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself.  Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism.

Drawing on analogies from music, nature, and the human brain, McGilchrist reveals the delicate harmony between separation and connection, a truth exemplified most vividly in the brain’s two hemispheres. Here, division and union are not adversaries but partners, each essential to the vitality of the other, enabling the brain to function as a unified and life-giving organ of thought and perception. Such a model reflects the very spirit of Ralston College’s aim to unify what modernity has fractured—the intellectual and the spiritual, the individual and the communal, the ancient and the urgent.

The lecture also engages with the concept of emergence, a phenomenon where systems reveal qualities and capacities far beyond what their components alone could predict.

Ultimately, McGilchrist’s argument aligns with the vision of this College: that division and union are not contradictory but complementary forces, driving the renewal of meaning and vitality. It is through this synthesis, through holding the tension between opposites, that true wholeness and innovation emerge—a principle as foundational to the functioning of the human brain as it is to the regeneration of our civilization.

• Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
• Pythagoras: 00:09:02:20
• Heraclitus: 00:21:34:04
• Goethe: 00:23:14:21
• Whitehead: 00:24:36:18
• Robert Rosen: 00:27:08:02
• Rowan Williams: 00:28:44:05
• Vesalius: 00:29:37:01
• Camillo Golgi: 00:35:14:22
• Santiago Ramon y Cajal: 00:35:47:05

A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychiatrist, philosopher, and literary critic, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, on the occasion of Dr McGilchrist’s March 2024 visit to Savannah to deliver Ralston College’s annual Sophia Lectures.

Dr McGilchrist discusses his experience spending time with Ralston College students, his reasons for accepting the College’s invitation to deliver the Sophia lectures, and the necessity of leisure for deep thought.

Applications for Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities program are now open.  Apply now.  

 

The second part of a conversation between the renowned literary scholar and psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist and Ralston College president Dr Stephen Blackwood about Dr McGilchrist’s remarkable educational trajectory.

In this episode, Dr Iain McGilchrist explains how he left his successful career as a literary scholar to pursue training as a psychiatrist and how his combined study of literature, philosophy, and neuroscience informed his later academic work, including his books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva, 2021).

List of people referenced in this episode:

• Ted Hughes
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Johnson
• John Boswell
• Laurence Sterne
• William Shakespeare
• Oliver Sacks
• John Cutting
• Louis Sass
• Jan Zwicky
• Robert Bringhurst
• Erwin Schrödinger
• Martin Heidegger
• Max Planck
• Niels Bohr
• Michael Levin