Stephen Blackwood is the founder and president of Ralston College.

He is the author of the Consolation of Boeotheus as Poetic Liturgy.

He joins us today to talk about the college and his vision of

higher education, actually secondary education, and lower education as well. Welcome, Stephen. We've

known each other for a while so we can be on a first name basis. Thanks very much, Mark. It's great to be here.

All right.

Give us an overview of what Ralston College is and does in year 2024.

All right. Well, the college is a new educational venture. It's a new university.

It's instituted in the state of Georgia, based in Savannah.

And it is constituted such that it could, over time, offer courses and degrees of study in any of the arts and sciences.

But what we've begun with is a focus on the humanities for a number of reasons, but fundamentally because we think those are the most important disciplines of the university to human culture, to human

civilization, to how we make sense of our lives, how we maintain the conditions of human

flourishing. What are the forms of life and culture that enable

human beings to flourish? So we've decided to focus on the humanities for that reason, also because,

you know, without being negative in a way that is perhaps not not fruitful, I think it's safe to say

that humanities are really suffering across the university spectrum for not being done anything

like as well.

There being some exceptions, of course, many good people, but really the humanities have profoundly lost their way.

And there's a connection between the humanities having lost their way and Western civilization,

or you might say human culture at large, having lost its way.

So we have started with folks in the humanities and started with one degree

to begin with, and that is a one-year graduate program, a master's in the humanities. It's a,

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