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

What does it take to spark a new Renaissance?