This brilliant introductory work pulls readers into the historical conversation that has shaped Western ideas for nearly three millennia. In this republished stand-alone volume, provides an insightful, new introduction to Hutchins’ work, along with notes and annotations that lend the wisdom of his 30-plus years of observations as a classical educator.

First published in 1952 as the introduction to the 54-volume collection, Hutchins pitches this “great conversation” as an ongoing dialogue between the great thinkers of the western world, from antiquity through modernity.

His main point is that a liberal education is not simply a matter of compiling a large mental warehouse of facts; it’s about entering into this conversation that has taken place between the greatest minds, those who have wrestled with the biggest questions about the human condition, like truth, goodness, justice, religion, and what it means to be truly human.

The Great Conversation is your tour guide to the best that has been thought and written in the western world. It’s a ticket to the proverbial train of thoughts that will allow the careful reader to view his own era through the lens of history’s deepest debates, and to see just how philosophy, poetry, science, and theology are integrated in the pursuit of genuine wisdom.

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When the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries pushed for a renewal of the classical studia humanitatis (i.e. grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy) in concert with Christian theology, they were met with significant opposition by educators long-steeped in the medieval scholastic pedagogy and Church theologians alike (e.g., Louvain divines).

Desiderius Erasmus set forth his manifesto for such a recovery in a work called, The Antibarbarians, a Platonic-styled dialogue in which a number of his friends gather in dutch garden at a country estate to discuss literature, theology, and the Republic of Letters.

By way of a monologue given by his chief interlocutor, Jacob Batt, Erasmus maps out the condition of the conflict and provides the world with a clear view of the battlefield they were facing. For Erasmus, the three enemies of Christian humanism were the destroyers, the reductionists, and the tyrants. I explore Batt’s monologue and give a brief overview of their enemies in this post.

If you’ve read my work for any length of time, then you’re likely aware that I too share a strong desire to once again recover such a Christian humanism for our day. And, it doesn’t take a whole lot of investigation to see we face enemies similar to those Erasmus and his contemporaries battled during the Renaissance. The recovery of a Christian humanism today will require the same faith, courage, and wisdom that was required of them.

In my last post, following Batt’s model, I addressed his first set of troublemakers, the destroyers. Masking their jealously and/or stupidity in some vague religious pretext, they attempt to eliminate the Republic of Letters root and branch.

In this post, I want to address the reductionists (Batt calls them limiters). These are the enemies who don’t feel the need to eliminate bonae litterae from our educational programs altogether. They just want to limit them significantly and subordinate what’s left to their own “superior,” skills-based curricula meant to prepare students for the job market.

The Reductionists (or Limiters)

This second enemy is much subtler, which makes them in some ways more troublesome. They are shifty and elusive—“more elusive than the Parthians, now saying yes and then no . . . like Proteus, / Into all kinds of wondrous shapes they change”—so that you can never pin them down on any thing. Batt calls them “the educated who are really uneducated, the people who somehow find other studies acceptable (that is, their own), but as for the humanities, without which all learning is blind, they hate them worse than a snake.”

Like Niethammer’s Philanthropinists, the limiters are arrogant. While advocating for sound “education,” they attempt to give students skills while downplaying and circumventing the humanities as an unnecessary waste of time. If they were truly educated, they would see there would be no literature without them.

When trying to imagine what this looks like, one might think of the disciples of John Dewey who misused his theory—that an emphasis on discussing careers with students would instigate a desire for learning—by truncating the discussion to mere utility (i.e., education is only about a career).

Enthralled with raw facts and hard information, like Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, modern educators have mistaken a student’s ability to retrieve data for education’s real end of soul formation and wisdom cultivation. Their approach is, quite literally, human reductionism (i.e., the making of utilitarian consumer-cogs for the marketplace and state).

I also need to point out that the limiters are not only secular utilitarians. There is a Christian variety, which is more dangerous to our cause because these limiters speaks our language. The Christian reductionists confine the Christian mind, in Harry Blamires’s phrase, to “a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct.”

One example comes from some anti-intellectual circles where there’s a tendency to absolutize the biblical vision for God’s glory. In this reductionist failure of thought, the redemption of man for the glory of God is often emphasized in such a way that man is portrayed as incidental to God’s plan. That is, salvation is only about God and his glory; thus, man remains, all his days on earth, a worthless worm with whom God merely tolerates. Learning is, therefore, vanity. Christian Humanists believe with Irenaeus, Gloria enim Dei vivens homo (“The glory of God is a living man”).

In other reductionist Christian thinking, man is an alien in this world who must separate from the culture, or stand over against it, while he waits for his ticket to heaven to be redeemed. Christian humanists believe Christ did not redeem humans so they could merely huddle and cuddle. We affirm that while redemption from our sins is more than we deserve, God also freely gives us with it abundant life (John 10:10). The humanities, after all, are known to cultivate human flourishing.

I would finally add that those of us in the classical renewal are not immune to reductionist thinking. Classical Christian Educators cannot simply aim at the low bar of “better democratic citizenship;” we must aim at the high bar of incarnational humanism. To put the matter in terms of C. S. Lewis’s acclaimed work, Mere Christianity: “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

The Weapons of our Warfare

Our tools against the limiters are, most importantly, definitions. The word education is nearly as misunderstood as the word liberal because it is too often associated with job training, surprisingly even amongst many Christian parents and classical educators.

The English word education comes from the Latin, educere. Fr. James Schall points out that, “The word educere means to bring forth, or to complete something already begun by the very fact that one is a human being.” Cogs and consumers are only valuable until they are no longer useful, but human beings have intrinsic, sacred value.

Our strongest defense against the limiters is to make our definitions and meanings clear so liberal educators can’t help but recognize students have eternal souls.

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In a previous post, I argued that recovering Christian Humanism in this post-modern era will require faith, courage, and wisdom. Which is to say, there’s an ongoing battle for the Republic of Letters, just like there was in Erasmus’s day. In his manifesto, The Antibarbarians, he maps out the battlefield through a monologue given by his chief interlocutor, Jacob Batt:

We shall therefore plead the cause of the old learning against its new opponents, and I see that the trouble comes mainly from three types of enemy. There are those who want the Republic of Letters to be destroyed root and branch. Others are doing their best to get its power not exactly extinguished, but restricted within narrower limits. Lastly there are those who want to see the republic preserved but utterly ruined, by themselves becoming tyrants, abrogating the laws of our fathers, and introducing foreign magistrates and behaviour.

For Erasmus, there are three enemies of Christian Humanism. They are the destroyers, the reductionists, and the tyrants:

1. The destroyers want to eliminate the Christian Humanism root and branch. In Erasmus’s day, these folks saw the humanities as antithetical to the Scholastic’s logic-based education and—due to its use of profane texts (secular in modern terms)—poisonous to the Christian faith.

2. The reductionists (he calls them limiters) don’t feel the need to eliminate them altogether, but do want to limit and subordinate bonae litterae to their own “superior” curricula and pedagogy. The study of “good letters” can come after, if at all.

3. The tyrants refer to the mendicant orders of Erasmus’s day. He called them “beggars who rule,” uneducated men who sought to be in charge of schools for their own ambitious ends—petty tyrants. These are pretenders who advocate for humanism but only for their own ends and not the ends of good letters and human flourishing.

The Destroyers

In this post, I’ll address the first enemy Batt names, those who want the Republic “destroyed root and branch.”

The destroyers possess nothing in the way of real weapons or knowledge of warfare. Yet, they are most dangerous because they are “a savage horde massed together from the fields and hills.” They are “uncouth people who detest the whole of literature (which they call poetry) on some vague religious pretext.” Further, they “don’t march into battle,” says Batt. Instead, “they throw themselves into it like ravening wild beasts, mistaking fury for fortitude.”

This enemy’s “four strong points” are “fury . . . , noise . . . , numbers . . . , and lastly a kind of shield which is the pretence of religion.”

Batt likens their fury to the Andabatae, the Roman gladiators who fought wearing helmets without eye-slits. Cicero, in a letter to a friend, uses the image in a joking manner to describe blind, flailing combat.

He likens their noise to Stentor, the “bronze-voiced… who could cry out in as great a voice of fifty other men” (Homer’s Iliad, 5.785-86). Since Hera (the wife of Zeus) borrows Stentor’s voice to shame the Argives into fighting harder, Erasmus may have in mind not only the volume of his enemy’s clamour, but also the fact they cry out with a counterfeit authority.

Next, he likens their number to one that exceeds Xerxes’s 1.7 million man infantry (Herodotus’s Histories, 7.60). Erasmus seems to be using the hyperbolic image as a way of pointing out the perennial idea that a mob’s strength is in its sheer numbers, never its intellectual acumen.

Lastly, they possess a shield—religious pretense—and, it’s under this defensive instrument that they most often shelter. Since they are outside the world of literature, the sluggish, envious, prideful mob asserts an offensive in a manner that is blind and flailing, loud and hyperbolic; then they immediately retreat under the attractively-named shield of “simplicity and religion.”

The destroyers are still with us. Consider that in one camp, the Christian camp, Christian Humanism is often unpopular with who have yet to answer Tertullian’s notorious inquiry, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” These, believing they would be committing the sin of loving the world (1 John 2:15), stumble at the idea of reading pagan literature and plundering it for the splintered light of God’s wisdom. In their stumbling, they often find themselves caught up in the mob of the destroyers.

As an aside, it’s unfortunate Tertullian is so often quoted as being the enemy of secular literature and learning when in his De Idolatria, he notes:

We know it may be said, “If teaching literature is not lawful to God’s servants, neither will learning be likewise;” and, “How could one be trained unto ordinary human intelligence, or unto any sense or action whatever, since literature is the means of training for all life? How do we repudiate secular studies, without which divine studies cannot be pursued?” Let us see, then, the necessity of literary erudition; let us reflect that partly it cannot be admitted, partly cannot be avoided (Tertullian, De Idolatria, Book X).

Although he had his rightful concerns about the influence of Paganism on the Church, Tertullian wasn’t so much of a curmudgeon that he didn’t recognize the paradox of becoming literate in a world that was fundamentally Pagan in its infrastructure. After all, Tertullian himself was a learned man of letters.

Of course, in this observation, I have admittedly digressed.

Notwithstanding, where Batt’s barbarians carried one shield, I would suggest the enemy of our day carries two. Christian Humanism is also unpopular with secularists who despise everything “Christian” and see the modifier as an attempt to create a Christian subculture of humanism, a concept the secularists claim to have formulated themselves. But their shield, too, is a pretense of religion; because secularism is not a neutral arena; it’s a civil religion with its own dogmas and exclusions.1

It is also of great interest that Erasmus’s analysis of the enemies of The Republic of Letters in his day maps near perfectly with our own digital public square (i.e., social media and the internet).

Consider the modern Andabatae. They are quick to make their judgment about ideas, books, articles, and authors completely unread; they launch their attacks from reading a mere headline, listening to a soundbite, watching a TikTok video, or encountering the screenshot of a single quote on X or Instagram. It would be too much to ask these blind keyboard gladiators to take the time to read, investigate, and ask questions. Blind fury is their weapon of choice.

Consider also just how loud the digital noise is today. It’s not the voice of fifty, but the voices of fifty million with which The Republic of Letters must contend. In fact, the digital noise of social media cultivates the very antithesis of the sustained attention on which rational public discourse and the entire Republic of Letters depends.

And what more needs to be said about the metrics and algorithms that have become the modern arbiter of an idea’s value or merit. Subscribers, followers, clicks, and views are the novel weights and measures of truth. Along the same religious lines is where we also find our slothful and envious shielding themselves. Except today, “simplicity and religion” go by the names, “relevance and equity.”

Our Weapons: Three Javelins and a Sword

Batt announces his tactics against the destroyers, saying: “I shall first force them to turn tail, using the most cogent arguments as javelins, and then, when they turn again to fight, I shall stab them with swords—the testimony of Holy Writ.” Following Batt, let me offer three javelins and a sword for our day.

The first javelin is borrowed from Batt: “you had better preach to the carpenters and warn them not to dare to use any of their saws, axes, adzes . . . this carpenter’s art and its tools were invented by Daedalus, a heathen. . . . If we are to be forbidden to use the inventions of the pagan world, what shall we have left I ask you . . . ? To such an extent is it true that we Christians have nothing we have not inherited from the pagans.”

Batt’s first javelin is the condition that not even Tertullian could escape. We’ve inherited a world that is infused with Pagan names and ideas; and concepts and arts that originated with the same. This is why Erasumus would assert: “Everything in the Pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society.”

The second javelin thrown at the secular destroyer is simply history. As Robert Thune put it two decades ago in his thesis prepared for the esteemed Richard Gamble, “Christian humanism is not some recent attempt to ‘Christianize’ a secular philosophy. It is secular humanism that is the aberration.” Virgil Nemoianu, whom Thune quotes, says it more sharply: “the humanities were born of—and, by right, still belong to—a Christian religious tradition.”

The third javelin is more of a distinction. Batt insists “that we should not run away from any heathen literature, but should hand it over, cleansed, to Christian learning. . . When I said cleansed, I was not referring to knowledge but to standpoint.” An example of this is Jesus’s and the Apostle’s use of literary idioms (Acts 4-5 & 9). This is Augustine’s “spoiling the Egyptians;” and also Basil’s admonishment to use the bees as a model for collecting the pollen while leaving the unusable parts of the flower.

Finally, the sword is Scripture’s own practice. Answering the charge that he defiled the Church with pagan learning, Jerome cites the inspired writers of the Old and New Testaments—Moses, the prophets, Solomon, and the Apostle Paul—who all used the “passages cited from Gentile books” to communicate the inspired truth of God’s Word to a pagan world, the same way David used the sword of Goliath to cut off the giant’s head.

In subsequent posts, I’ll unpack the last two enemies of Christian Humanism and reveal their hideouts and tactics in our modern landscape. Be sure to ❤️ this post and subscribe to get them delivered right to your inbox.

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Before I discovered the little movement called Classical Christian Education, I understood Christianity and Humanism to be worldviews mutually exclusive of one another. But, I soon learned Secular Humanism is, historically speaking, an aberration; whereas, Christian Humanism is technically a redundant term, saying twice what really should only need to be said once. In other words, Humanism was Christian first!

My argument since has been that instead of despising the “dirty” word Humanism, Christians actually need to reclaim it. And, reclamation is not merely adding the opposing adjectival designator, Christian, to the concept of Humanism; we’re not creating another tidy sub-culture like contemporary Christians have done with so many other aspects of culture (e.g., Christian music, Christian art, and Christian fiction, etc.). We’re reclaiming what rightfully belongs to Christ and his Church.

The expression Christian Humanism came into use following the work of 19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Niethammer (1766–1848), whose work sought to distinguish between two competing educational paradigms: Humanism and Philanthropinism. Philanthropinism emphasized utilitarian and practical education based on Enlightenment rationalism. Humanism, in his usage, referred to the Christian Renaissance tradition of holistic, formative education rooted in bonae litterae (‘Good Letters’) and the liberal arts.

The substance of Christian Humanism is much older than Niethammer, however. Jens Zimmermann, along with an abundance of additional scholarship, has carefully demonstrated that while the expression was coined later in history, the substance of Christian Humanism not only significantly predates secular, atheistic Humanism, but has existed since Christianity itself. Before the Incarnation, its inchoate forms sprang from a mixture of Hebrew Humanism and Greek Idealism; but it was the Incarnation that gave birth to Humanism.

Christian Humanism embraces the conviction that human nature is created imago dei (in the image of God), wounded by sin, and restored and perfected in the incarnate Christ. Thus, the Incarnation affirms the dignity of humanity and God’s lovingkindness toward mankind. And, while man is not the measure of all things, he is in the middle of all things—higher than the beasts and a little lower than the angels. Consequently, because all human beings are created imago Dei, they possess common grace, free agency, and individual conscience; humans are, therefore, creatures of immense worth, dignity, reason, and responsibility.

Thus, it follows that everything truly human, including reason, language, art, learning, and civic life, is to be received, cultivated, and ordered toward the Lordship of Christ. As Desiderius Erasmus wrote, “Everything in the pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society.”

In sum, the ethical posture of Christian Humanism is not man-centered but incarnationally centered; it holds that unencumbered rational inquiry is intrinsic in the doctrines of Christianity and not opposed to it; it holds the belief that tensions exist between faith, imagination, and reason are unfounded; instead, these faculties are a complementary and creative means for a flourishing human culture; it emphasizes a paideia unto the Lord in which the Christian Scriptures together with bonae litterae (the humane letters of the virtuous pagans) serve to form persons who are wise, eloquent, and holy; it maintains an allegiance to the Republic of Letters over and above mere national and ethnic boundaries.

Recovering Christian Humanism in our day will require faith, courage, and wisdom. But recovering it is obviously not enough. If it is worth recovering, it’s also worth defending. In Erasmus’s Antibarbarians, Jacob Batt maps the battlefield for us quite well:

We shall therefore plead the cause of the old learning against its new opponents, and I see that the trouble comes mainly from three types of enemy. There are those who want the Republic of Letters to be destroyed root and branch. Others are doing their best to get its power not exactly extinguished, but restricted within narrower limits. Lastly there are those who want to see the republic preserved but utterly ruined, by themselves becoming tyrants, abrogating the laws of our fathers, and introducing foreign magistrates and behaviour.

For Erasmus, there are three enemies of Christian Humanism. There are the destroyers, the reductionists, and the tyrants.

The destroyers want to eliminate the Christian Humanism root and branch. In Erasmus’s day, these folks saw the humanities as antithetical to the Scholastic’s logic-based education and—due to its use of profane texts (secular in modern terms)—poisonous to the Christian faith.

The reductionists (he calls them limiters) don’t feel the need to eliminate them altogether, but do want to limit and subordinate bonae litterae to their own “superior” curricula and pedagogy. The study of “good letters” can come after, if at all.

The tyrants refer to the mendicant orders of Erasmus’s day. He called them “beggars who rule,” uneducated men who sought to be in charge of schools for their own ambitious ends—petty tyrants. These are pretenders who advocate for humanism but only for their own ends and not the ends of good letters and human flourishing.

In subsequent posts, I’ll unpack these three enemies of Christian Humanism and reveal their hideouts and tactics in our modern landscape. Be sure to ❤️ this post and subscribe to get them delivered right to your inbox.

Subscribe now

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In Part 1, I established intellectual virtue cannot be separated from moral virtue. And, to be good at anything that requires sound thinking, like school leadership, one must be committed to taking personal ownership of perceiving what it’s going to take to get to the truth of the matter and the moral responsibility t…

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“Everything in the Pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society!”1

Desiderius Erasmus’s humanist mantra is set in the mouth of Jacob Batt, a character in The Antibarbarians who serves as a secretary of the town council in the city of Bergen. Through the speeches and dialogues of the characters in his seminal work—all based loosely on his real-life friends and colleagues—the “prince of humanists” lays out significant aspects of Christian humanism.

A fuller excerpt of Batt’s speech expounds on one of the key tenets of Christian humanism, suggesting with St. Augustine that there are spoils possessed by the Egyptians that were prepared by God in advance for the benefit and welfare of God’s people. Proverbs 13:22: …the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous.

Batt (Erasmus) says,

Everything in the Pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society! He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought. Their age produced this harvest of creative work, not so much for them as for us; just as every region cannot supply every commodity, nor (as Virgil says) does every land grow everything, so it seems to me that every century is allotted its own gifts. Many of the philosophers wore out their lives and their brains in seeking the highest good; but the real highest good, the perfect gift, was reserved by Christ for his own time. However he did not intend all the rest to be useless and done to no purpose. We see with our own eyes how in material things nature takes care that no portion of time shall slip away uselessly. Look at the trees (the sight of them suggests this example to me):

Batt goes on the illustrate his point by highlighting the seasonal changes of an apple tree. Spring supplies the sap and the budding flowers. Summer produces the pulp of the fruit and autumn the ripe apples which fall and produce new shoots from its seeds. Even winter, in its interval of quiet, plays the part of reestablishing the cycle. The manner of the planets and all of nature work the same way, he argues. The great discord of nature is actually working toward “the completest concord.”

So it is in the generations that proceeded Christ. His time was, of course, “the recognition of the highest good,” but the virtuous pagans had their own special privilege in the scheme of history too, striving to reach the things nearest to the highest good. Christ is the ripe fruit, but their generations were the sap and the bud that prepared the way. Similarly, the generations following will play their own special part in the work of bringing about the completest concord—the spread of the gospel and the discipling of the nations.

This manner of thinking about the reformation of humanity is a fundamental key to understanding Christian Humanism. It’s ancestor to Abraham Kuyper’s famous claim that, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!”2

Notwithstanding, when we speak of Christian Humanism today, the expression can be off-putting to readers. For many, these two words don’t belong together. They ring something of an oxymoron, like “sweet sorrow,” “cruel kindness,” or “military intelligence.”

This is because, on the one hand, widespread conceptions of evangelical Christianity tend toward notions of anti-intellectual fundamentalism. On the other hand, the common understanding of humanists are that of “enlightened,” anti-religious priests of secularism. In popular lore, these visions of life are mutually exclusive and fundamentally at odds with one another.

Yet, this popular assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. As I explain in my Very Short Explanation of Christian Humanism,

Christian Humanism predates secular, atheistic humanism which has borrowed the term and some of its effects, cut-flower. Further, Christian humanism is not man-centered; it’s incarnationally centered. That is, the Incarnation affirms the dignity of humanity and God’s lovingkindness toward him. Finally, Christian humanism acknowledges that Christ is the ideal human, and in him, we recover the fullness of our humanity. Therefore, Christian humanism seeks to recover and restore a vision of human flourishing under the lordship of Christ, integrating faith, reason, and the moral imagination.

Christian humanism is rooted in the tradition of men like St. Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Erasmus, and Milton—thinkers who saw that truth, goodness, and beauty are coherent in Christ and accessible through a disciplined and grace-informed intellect.

Perhaps J. Gresham Machen captures the concept best in his classic work, Christianity and Liberalism, where he writes,

The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten. There was always something to be covered up; the enthusiasm of the architect was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin. In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up. The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all, and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him. Such is the higher Christian humanism - a humanism founded not upon human pride but upon divine grace.3

When humanists think that they can promote and cultivate an educated class of flourishing human beings by erasing religion and setting man up as the measure of all things, his project will crumble because it’s rotten at the foundation. Humanity is fallen; men and women are sinners. On the flip-side, when Christians think pious religion is the continual beating of the breast and crying, “Woe is me!” and “man will never be anything more than a worm,” they fall into the other ditch, something Machen calls “the religion of the broken hearted.”

Christian humanism affirms the efficacy of the gospel. And the gospel’s transformative power has, in large part, been the impetus for Christian thinkers, writers, and educators from John the Evangelist and the Apostle Paul to Flannery O’Connor and C. S. Lewis.

The written testimonies of those who witnessed the Incarnation claim Christianity is the ultimate (and arguably first) humanism because while Christianity is chiefly interested in the glory of God and transcendent matters of the human soul, it is also deeply concerned with texts, human flourishing, and society’s common good. These focal points of Christianity are not bifurcations of priorities. They are interdependent and consistent with Jesus’s mission. As the Church Father Irenaeus made abundantly clear in his work Against Heresies, “the glory of God is a living man.”4

Christian humanists believe everything that is good, true, and beautiful belongs to and comes from God. Even the good works of Pagan and pre-Christian cultures were inspired by the Holy Spirit for his own purposes. That includes literature, philosophy, art, poetry, rhetoric, politics, etc.). It’s up to Christians to harvest the pollen from their flowers and make good honey. Such is the high calling of Christian Humanism.

The reason I publish BOOKS AND LETTERS is to promote Christian humanism and provide humane reflections on literature, culture, and education in an age dominated by fleeting trends and digital noise.

Because authentic humanism can only flourish under the lordship of Christ, my first book, Beloved of God and Called to be Saints, is an exposition of St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome, where he offers his longest and most sustained theological explanation of the gospel.

This is where he unpacks the gospel’s power to save the unrighteous and establish a flourishing humanity in the new age of Spirit-led liberty, a humanity that is united in and by Jesus Christ for the glory of God the Father.

If you’re interested in exploring Christian humanism, let me invite you to become a free subscriber to BOOKS AND LETTERS.

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Then grab my 378-page book with 267 daily reflections (i.e., theological crumbs) on Paul’s letter to the Romans. It’s not a sentimental devotional; it’s a humble invitation to those who want to see more clearly.

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Strangely, I just held a physical copy of my book for the first time, yesterday (mos…

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We’ve probably all experienced that one particular uneasy moment whenever you’ve set the table for special company—that moment when the doorbell rings. We race through our mental checklists to make sure we didn’t forget anything, check our teeth for some stray piece of broccoli hanging around, and then open the do…

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Over the last three videos, I’ve been making a case for education that I believe with all my heart.

In the first video: modern education, with its watertight bulkheads, teaches students subjects but fails to teach them how to think. They learn everything except the art of learning.

In the second video: there is a better road to education, the road the West always regarded as self-evident. The Great Conversation. Six years, one cohort, reading the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order as living voices, organized around the six great ideas: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice.

In the third video: how it works. Two ninety-minute Socratic seminars each week. Thirty-two weeks a year. Four high school credits per year—twenty-four credits over six years—covering literature, history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric, all integrated, the way reality itself is integrated. You add physical education, math and lab science. The rest is here.

Today, I simply want to invite you!

This fall, I am opening The Great Conversation to its founding cohort: twelve to sixteen students, ages twelve to thirteen. These students will begin with Genesis and Homer in year one, and six years later they will finish with Lewis, Tolkien, and Solzhenitsyn — having read the whole arc of the Western tradition together, in order, as one community.

The tuition is $3,000 per year—$18,000 across the full six years—and that rate is locked when you enroll. It will NOT increase for your family, EVER, regardless of what future cohorts pay. Plus, you can pay annually or monthly interest-free.

Let me put that figure in perspective. Three thousand dollars a year, for four high school credits, works out to $750 per credit for live instruction, twice a week, in a seminar capped at sixteen students, taught by a PhD who has given his career to this tradition.

Families routinely pay more than that for a single online course with a fraction of this scope. And a classical Christian day school, where the humanities block would be one part of a much larger tuition, typically runs many times this amount each year.

I’ve priced the course this way deliberately, because I want it filled with the right students. I’m not running an elite prep-school for students of the wealthiest families. As Hutchins frequently argued, the education of “the best” is the best education for all.

Now, I want to be candid with you about how enrollment works, because it is different from anything else you’ve probably encountered. Because of its six-year continuity, this cohort enrolls only once. And then it closes. That’s just the nature of this kind of course.

There is no joining it in year two or year three. The depth of the conversation in year five depends entirely on what these same students argued about in year two, for example. A student who wasn’t there for Achilles can’t fully answer for Aeneas. The cohort is not a feature of the course. The cohort is the course.

So when these twelve to sixteen seats are filled, the door closes, not until next fall, but for six years.

If you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old, this is the moment! Not because I say so, but because arithmetic says so: a six-year course that begins at twelve must begin at twelve.

There is an old proverb I’ve shared with my readers before: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Math is math.

Next Steps

Here is your next step. Below this video you’ll find a link to an interest form. It takes about two minutes to fill it out. Tell me about your child: who they are, what they love, where they are in their education.

I will personally follow up with every family. We’ll have a real conversation where you can ask me anything; and together we’ll discern whether this course is the right fit for your child. No pressure, and no obligation. If it isn’t the right fit, I’ll tell you so, and I’ll gladly point you toward what is.

But if it is the right fit—if you have one of those young people who is hungry for something real—then I would count it a privilege to spend the next six years introducing your child to Homer and Moses, to Plato and Paul, to Augustine and Dante, to Shakespeare and Milton, to Dostoevsky and Lewis and Tolkien.

The Great Conversation has been going on for three thousand years. It has never ended. It is waiting for your child to join it.

Fill out the interest form today, and let’s talk about your child’s seat at the table.

I hope to meet your family soon.

Interest Form

In the second video, I introduced you to the Great Conversation: a six-year integrated humanities course in which a single cohort of twelve to sixteen students reads the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, from Genesis and Homer to Lewis, Tolkien, and Solzhenitsyn.

In this video, I want to answer the practical questions about the course. It’s one thing to agree that children need a humane education. It is another thing to build an academic year for a real child in a real family with real limitations.

So let me walk you through exactly how this course works.

The Schedule

The cohort meets with me live, online, twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, for ninety minutes per session. We conduct two weekly Socratic seminars modeled on the Adler and Hutchins Paideia approach. Each year runs thirty-two weeks, organized into four eight-week terms, with natural breaks at the regular academic intervals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and summer.

Ninety minutes, twice a week, may not sound like much compared to a seven-hour school day. But I’d ask you to consider what actually happens in those hours.

It would be distracting to talk about it in this video but you can watch my 11-minute short film called, We’ve Been Schooled to learn why it happens. In short, modern education has succeeded at what it set out to do, which is to occupy the family’s valuable time by having students do busy work to prepare them for the industrialized State.

In any case, I love what Hutchins said about our modern education model:

“The American scheme of an eight-year elementary school, a four-year high school, and a four-year college, with graduate and professional work on top of that, is unique in the world, and we cannot congratulate ourselves on its uniqueness.“

In a Socratic seminar, no one hides in the back row. Every student reads, every student reasons, every student speaks. Three hours of genuine dialectic, sustained across six years, will form a mind in ways that thousands of hours of passive instruction never will.

The Course Curriculum

This is one integrated course, but it does the work of many. Studying the great books in an integrated fashion weaves together literature, history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, and architecture, along with some math, astronomy, and natural science where the tradition itself takes them up, as when we read the ancients on the cosmos or the early moderns on the new science. And running through all six years: logic, writing, and rhetoric, taught not as separate subjects but naturally and organically through the texts themselves.

The writing progression is deliberate. Students begin in year one with narration and imitation—learning, as I frequently tell my students, that good writing is clear thinking made visible. They progress through analysis and argumentation, and they finish in year six with a substantial senior thesis, defended aloud before their peers. Six years of weekly writing under the eye of one teacher who knows exactly how each student’s prose has developed since he or she was twelve years old.

Course Credits and Outcomes

Each year of The Great Conversation is technically worth four high school credits, distributed across humanities, writing and rhetoric, logic, history and civics, theology, and fine arts. Over six years, that’s twenty-four credits, which means this one course provides your student’s complete humanities education. As a parent, you need to add, really, only three things: gymnasium or PE, a mathematics sequence, and laboratory science. Everything else is here, and it is integrated rather than scattered.

I want to pause on that point, because I’ve counseled hundreds of homeschooling families, and I know where the burden actually falls. It is not usually the math curriculum that exhausts parents. It is the finding and coordination of five or six separate providers, each with its own philosophy, its own schedule, its own gaps. As I have been saying, one of the chief weaknesses of modern education is fragmentation. But reality is not fragmented this way. All truth belongs to the One Truth. A better education helps students see the integrated nature of knowledge; it helps them understand the world as cosmos rather than chaos.

Reading Load

We begin gently. In the first term of year one, students read twenty to thirty pages a week, enough to go slowly, to reread, to wonder. The load grows deliberately each year, so that by years five and six students are reading at a genuine college-preparatory pace, over a hundred pages a week, and handling it with confidence because they were led there step by step. In the Great Conversation, the student is led, not driven.

The Teacher and the Community

Curriculum matters, but curriculum alone is not enough. Education is mentorship. It is discipleship. It is transformation. A child is always being formed; the question is not whether formation is happening. The question is: who is forming the child, and toward what end?

For six years, your child will be formed in a community of serious-minded Christian peers, reading the greatest books ever written, under a teacher who has spent more than thirty years in this tradition, as a classroom teacher, a pastor, a college professor, a journal editor, and the president of a classical education institution. I will know your child’s mind. I will know how he reasons, where she hesitates, what he loves, and what she is capable of. There is no substitute for that kind of continuity; even though there are some wonderful courses and teachers out there, no year-by-year program can offer it.

The Ideal Student

Now, the last question is who is this course for?

It is for families committed to a classical Christian education who want the depth of a great books formation without assembling it piecemeal. It is for students who are curious, who ask hard questions, and are not content with the surface of things. And it is for parents who understand that students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession.

Disclaimer

And I’ll be honest with you: this course is not for everyone. A six-year commitment is a serious commitment. A student who does not want to read should not be made to fill one of these seats. There are better paths for that child, and I’d be glad to help you find one.

In the final video, I’m going to extend the invitation: describe the details of enrollment, talk about the investment, and explain why this cohort—unlike nearly every other course you will ever consider—enrolls once and then closes.

I’ll see you there!

Six years ago, Kepler Education, where I serve as President, hosted our first Consortium Conference in Louisiana—the Southern Consortium of Classical Educators. That year, we hosted a one-day conference and luncheon to encourage and equip families and educators already involved or in…

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In this video, I want to show you the alternative. And to do that, I need to tell you about two men and a very big idea.

In 1952, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was then president of the University of Chicago, and the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, published a fifty-four-volume set called the Great Books of the Western World. The first volume in the series was Hutchins’ introduction to the set. There is something he wrote in that introduction that I want to draw your attention to. Hutchins wrote:

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition.

He called the great books the road to education; neither a supplement nor an elective. The identified them as the road, the pathway, the means of acquiring one’s education.

What Hutchins and Adler understood is that the great books of the Western world are not simply artifacts in a museum collection. They are a long, sustained conversation, the written record of the poets and philosophers throughout the West who have discussed and debated, for nearly three millennia, the perennial questions that relate to the human condition.

We encounter Homer speaking, Plato answering and Virgil building on Homer. St. Augustine answers Plato and Dante gathers all of them up into a single vision. Hobbs disagrees with Aristotle and Rousseau borrowing from and nuancing Hobbs, puts forth his own vision. And, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien shine the whole inheritance bravely and brightly into the darkness of the modern, progressive twentieth century.

Hutchins called this the Great Conversation. And the remarkable thing about this conversation is that it has never ended. It only waits for the next generation to join it.

To read the great books is to engage in the Great Conversation, to discover how generations of people understood the answers to the perennial human questions, and to see how ideas have consequences, and which of those ideas have shaped our present moment.

The Great Conversation Course

Now, here is what I am offering your family.

My Great Conversation course is a six-year, integrated humanities course for students who begin at twelve or thirteen years old. I’m inviting twelve to sixteen students of this age to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort, where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order. We will engage these works not as museum artifacts but as what Chesterton called, “the democracy of the dead,” living voices in a long and lively conversation.

Each year of the course is anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six great ideas Mortimer Adler identified in his book Six Great Ideas as threads running through the whole of Western thought: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice.

Year One: Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul. The big idea is Truth. We read Genesis, Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Plato, etc., and we ask: What is real, and how do we know it?

Year Two: Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man. The big idea is Goodness. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, the New Testament, etc. What is virtue, and how is it cultivated?

Year Three: Faith, Reason, and the City of God. The big idea is Beauty. St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet, etc.. What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us?

Year Four: Renaissance, Reformation, and the Collapse of Christendom. The big idea is Liberty. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Rutherford, etc. What is freedom, and what does it cost?

Year Five: Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self. The big idea is Equality. Locke, Burke, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity?

Year Six: Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery. The big idea is Justice. Chesterton, Eliot, Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, etc. What do we owe one another, and on what basis?

Along the way, students will study the flow of big ideas in the historical narrative: for example, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured on cross in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, then fragmented in the modern era.

Together, we will read history, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, even some astronomy and natural science. And, all of it will be synchronized to the civilization we’re reading, because that’s how the tradition actually holds together.

The Most Significant Component

Now let me tell you about the part of this course that I believe matters most; it’s the part almost no other program offers.

The students who begin this course together will finish it together. The same cohort for six years. Why does that matter? Because the Great Conversation cannot be had alone, and it cannot be had well with strangers.

Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence; and they will do so together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year.

By year four, these students will share an intellectual vocabulary. By year six, when they read Nietzsche, they will answer him with the Plato and Augustine they read together years before. That is what it means to join a conversation rather than take a class!

By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities.

More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years of their lives to.

In the next video, I’m going to get practical. I’ll talk about the weekly schedule, the credits, the reading load, the writing your child will produce, and exactly what this course covers so you can see how it fits into your family’s plan.

I’ll see you in the next video.

“Do you often come across people,” she asked,

for whom, all their lives, a ‘subject’ remains a ‘subject,’ divided by watertight bulkheads from all other ‘subjects,’ so that they experience very great difficulty making any mental connection between, say, philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Let’s think about that image for a moment.

A watertight bulkhead is a wall inside a ship, sealed so that nothing passes from one compartment to the next. This is a fine thing for a ship, but it’s a disaster for a human mind.

Sayers pressed the point even further. “Is it not the great defect of our education today,” she asked, “that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.”

I’ve been an educator for more than thirty years, and I have to tell you: not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency nearly eighty years ago.

Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Students take Math at nine o’clock; history at ten; literature at eleven. Each discipline is sealed in its own watertight compartment. Each with its own textbook. Each disconnected from the others. And, more often than not, each is disconnected from the child’s soul.

But here is the thing every parent instinctively knows: reality is not fragmented that way. Learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, the reality from which subjects are merely extracted, or dissected.

When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he was not writing “literature,” per se. He was writing theology, astronomy, politics, philosophy, and poetry all at once, because that is what reality is actually like. When the medieval builders raised a cathedral, they were dealing with geometry, engineering, music, and worship all in a single act. The whole was greater than the sum of all of its parts.

A truly humane education is an integrated education; it’s an education that teaches students how to see and how to think about reality in all of its layers and complexities, such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts.

Now, why am I telling you this?

Because if you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old right now, you are standing at the single most important educational crossroads of that child’s life.

These next six years—from about age twelve to 18 (i.e, graduation)—are the years when a young person’s mind and character take their lasting shape. It’s true that early development plays a huge part in a child’s personality, but these are the years when a student either learns to think, or merely learns to check boxes and perform the prescriptive hoop-jumping routines of cogs and consumers. These are the years when the child will either come to love what is true, good, and beautiful or learn to love whatever the algorithm serves him next.

A drum that I am continually beating, something I tell parents every chance I get is education, rightly understood, is the formation of a human soul. It is the noble work of passing down wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next. It is where every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves.

Consider that in the modern world, we have learned how to effectively transfer information to a machine. We’ve learned how to store massive data in clouds and on devices. And just like our machines, modern education has taught students to accumulate disconnected facts while remaining unformed, unwise, and spiritually malnourished.

And in an age when artificial intelligence can produce gobs of information instantly and endlessly, the one thing your child needs most is the one thing you cannot get from a machine: a humane education. The education of the whole person. An education that forms judgment, imagination, courage, eloquence, attention, and wisdom.

That is why, this fall, I am offering something I have spent the better part of my career preparing to teach: a robust, integrated humanities course called The Great Conversation.

It’s a single course of study that spans six full years, covering the best primary literature of the Western tradition from antiquity to postmodernity, with history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric woven together the way reality actually holds them together.

This course is not a collection of subjects confined to watertight bulkheads. It’s one ship, built whole.

In the next video, I’m going to tell you exactly what the Great Conversation is, where the phrase comes from, what my six-year course covers, and why a small cohort of students reading together for six consecutive years accomplishes something no year-by-year program can ever replicate.

Let me encourage you to take a moment to ask yourself Sayers’s question about your own child’s education: is he (or she) learning “subjects” or is he (or she) learning the art of learning?

I’ll see you in a couple of days in the next video.

We all agreed there was plenty of ti…

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Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon, cellulose and the distribution of rainfall—or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?… Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.

—Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency all the way back in 1947. But learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, from which subjects are merely extracted or dissected.

A truly humane education is an integrated education that teaches students how to see and think about reality in all its layers and complexities such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts (i.e., subjects).

That’s why I am offering a new course this fall, a robust, integrated humanities course called “The Great Conversation” that spans a full six years, covering the best primary literature from antiquity to postmodernity.

The Great Conversation course is organized around the most profound perennial human questions, the very same questions that got Socrates executed, the same questions Augustine wrestled with in his Confessions, Dante mapped onto the architecture of the cosmos, and that men like Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien brought bravely and brightly into the twentieth century.

A Six-Year Structural Architecture

I’m inviting 12-16 students (12-13 years old) to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, engaging them as living voices in a long and lively conversation.

Students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession. Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence.

They will study, for instance, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedral, and fragmented in the modern era. And they will do all of this together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year.

By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities. More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years to.

Basic Functionality

Each 32-week year is organized into four 8-week terms, covering:

• Great Books (primary sources, heavily weighted)

• Writing & Rhetoric (progressing from imitation to argumentation to original thesis)

• Logic (formal and informal, integrated with texts)

• Art & Music (chronologically synchronized with literary/historical period)

• Geography, Civics, & Economics (contextualizing the civilizations being read)

• Theology (Christian Scripture and theological tradition in dialogue with secular texts)

Two weekly, 90-minute Socratic Seminar component runs through all six years, modeled on the Adler'/Hutchins Paideia approach.

A reasonable annual credit allocation for such a 32-week, 3-contact-hour per week curriculum would be:

Each year will be anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six perennial questions Mortimer J. Adler identified in his Six Great Ideas as the threads running through the whole of Western thought.

Year I - Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul

• Big Idea: Truth

• Ages: 12-13

• Chronological Focus: Antiquity to Classical Greece

• Textual Focus: Genesis, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Pre-Socratics, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, etc.

• Objective Focus: What is real, and how do we know it?

Year II - Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man

• Big Idea: Goodness

• Ages: 13-14

• Chronological Focus: Classical Greece through Roman Empire

• Textual Focus: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, and the New Testament.

• Objective Focus: What is virtue, and how is it cultivated?

Year III - Faith, Reason, and the City of God

• Big Idea: Beauty

• Ages: 14-15

• Chronological Focus: Fall of Rome to the Medieval world

• Textual Focus: Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet.

• Objective Focus: What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us?

Year IV - Renaissance, Reformation, and the End of Christendom

• Big Idea: Liberty

• Ages: 15–16

• Chronological Focus: Renaissance to the Early Modern Period

• Textual Focus: Erasmus, More, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Pascal, Rutherford.

• Objective Focus: What is freedom, and what does it cost?

Year V - Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self

• Big Idea: Equality

• Ages: 16–17

• Chronological Focus: Early Modern to Modern Era

• Textual Focus: Locke, Rousseau, Burke, The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, etc.

• Objective Focus: What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity?

Year VI - Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery

• Big Idea: Justice

• Ages: 17-18

• Chronological Focus: Modern Era to Postmodern Era

• Textual Focus: Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, Sartre, Heidegger, Polanyi, etc.

• Objective Focus: What do we owe one another, and on what basis?

If you have a child 12-14 years old that you think would be interested, please use this button to express your interest. I would be happy to follow up.

Interest Form

Behind the Scenes: Thank You for Filling This Course

When I launched my recent book, Becoming Classically Educated, I wanted to find a way to immediately get the message out and put its contents into practice in a meaningful way. Being a teacher, I naturally conceived of a seminar-oriented course where I c…

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