From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

One desire, timeless desire, that Christmas Carol gets at, is this desire that change be possible for us and for the people in our lives.

And we all live with people who we wish

would change. That's just the reality of human life. This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's

Dr. Dwight Lindley, Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College and your teacher for the brand

new Hillsdale Online course, A Christmas Carol.

Dr. Lindley, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Scott. Great to be here.

Always a pleasure to have you by, and we talk about a very cool online course today on A Christmas Carol.

Now, nearly everyone, I imagine, is familiar with a Christmas Carol.

So why is there a need for this course?

Sure, good question.

I think sometimes the things we're most familiar with are things that are very important to us.

That's why we're familiar with them.

They're familiar through long repetition, you know, the way that our family members are familiar

to us, our children, our spouses, our loved ones of various kinds.

The same with books, with art, with films.

And so I think there's depth there, which is why we're, we keep on going back to them.

I think in this case, we're so familiar with it because it's about things that are so important to us.

Christmas is important to us, whether we've thought about that a lot or not.

And this, this story gets at things that are at the heart of it.

It's familiar.

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