Theology of the Body and the Shape of a Life with Alicia Coyle
What does the body reveal about vocation and our search for communion? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Alicia Coyle about Theology of the Body, motherhood, feminine formation, chastity, education, and the slow work of composing a life around gift rather than competition. Their conversation moves from John Paul II and Edith Stein to Little Women, Aristotle, Mary at Cana, and the daily patterns of homeschooling, prayer, reading, and family life. For parents seeking a wiser way through cultural confusion, Alicia offers a thoughtful vision of embodiment as something neither limiting nor abstract, but deeply human, practical, and full of invitation.
Together, Christine and Alicia consider how ideas become incarnate through teachers, friendships, families, and habits. They ask what it means to see the body as meaningful, how women and men can offer distinct gifts without rivalry, and why formation begins not with rules alone, but with anthropology, wonder, and the truth of the person made in the image of God.
Rusty Reno on The Ordinary Practices that Shape the Soul
What does it take to form a life with roots, discipline, and courage in an age of distraction and drift? In this episode of Forged, Brian Williams talks with R. R. Reno about the ordinary practices that shape the soul: family dinners, church, books, marriage, friendship, cooking, architecture, and the demanding craft of rock climbing. Reno reflects on growing up in Baltimore, learning endurance in Yosemite, finding stability in marriage and worship, and pursuing excellence as a teacher, writer, and Christian. Along the way, he considers why beauty trains our affections, why embodied disciplines matter, and what it means to “do battle without hatred.”
The conversation moves from childhood rhythms and the gift of rootedness to the spiritual trial of physical risk, the public nature of architecture, and the vocation of First Things as a guide for readers seeking clarity in a fractured cultural moment.
Growing Up Classical: Literature, Wisdom, and the Questions We Carry
What does it mean to grow up classical, and how can the great books help form a young person’s moral imagination? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Olivia Reardon, a graduating senior at Messiah University, about literature, ethical formation, and the classical Christian classroom. Drawing from Olivia’s senior honors thesis and her upcoming ClassicalU course, Journeying with the Great Books: Ethical Formation in the Classical Christian Classroom, the conversation explores how stories give students language for their deepest questions, offer “handholds” for living in a broken world, and invite readers to return again and again as they grow in wisdom.
Together, Christine and Olivia reflect on reading as a relational and formative act, one that happens best in a community of trust, conversation, and shared attention. Olivia offers the images of mirrors, windows, and doors as a way of understanding how books help students see themselves, encounter others, and enter experiences beyond their own. The conversation also considers the breadth of the Great Conversation, not as a narrow inheritance for a few, but as a living tradition shaped by many voices and offered for the formation of all.
Podcast Series
Dive deeper into the ideas driving the renewal of classical education
In this podcast, author and poet Christine Perrin interviews women (and some men) to discover how they have composed a life of meaningful patterns and routines that give life to themselves and their families.
In this podcast, Dr. Brian Williams of the Templeton Honors College interviews men (and some women) to learn how they seek to forge meaningful lives of at work, home, and in the broader culture.
Theology of the Body and the Shape of a Life with Alicia Coyle
What does the body reveal about vocation and our search for communion? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Alicia Coyle about Theology of the Body, motherhood, feminine formation, chastity, education, and the slow work of composing a life around gift rather than competition. Their conversation moves from John Paul II and Edith Stein to Little Women, Aristotle, Mary at Cana, and the daily patterns of homeschooling, prayer, reading, and family life. For parents seeking a wiser way through cultural confusion, Alicia offers a thoughtful vision of embodiment as something neither limiting nor abstract, but deeply human, practical, and full of invitation.
Together, Christine and Alicia consider how ideas become incarnate through teachers, friendships, families, and habits. They ask what it means to see the body as meaningful, how women and men can offer distinct gifts without rivalry, and why formation begins not with rules alone, but with anthropology, wonder, and the truth of the person made in the image of God.
Rusty Reno on The Ordinary Practices that Shape the Soul
What does it take to form a life with roots, discipline, and courage in an age of distraction and drift? In this episode of Forged, Brian Williams talks with R. R. Reno about the ordinary practices that shape the soul: family dinners, church, books, marriage, friendship, cooking, architecture, and the demanding craft of rock climbing. Reno reflects on growing up in Baltimore, learning endurance in Yosemite, finding stability in marriage and worship, and pursuing excellence as a teacher, writer, and Christian. Along the way, he considers why beauty trains our affections, why embodied disciplines matter, and what it means to “do battle without hatred.”
The conversation moves from childhood rhythms and the gift of rootedness to the spiritual trial of physical risk, the public nature of architecture, and the vocation of First Things as a guide for readers seeking clarity in a fractured cultural moment.
Growing Up Classical: Literature, Wisdom, and the Questions We Carry
What does it mean to grow up classical, and how can the great books help form a young person’s moral imagination? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Olivia Reardon, a graduating senior at Messiah University, about literature, ethical formation, and the classical Christian classroom. Drawing from Olivia’s senior honors thesis and her upcoming ClassicalU course, Journeying with the Great Books: Ethical Formation in the Classical Christian Classroom, the conversation explores how stories give students language for their deepest questions, offer “handholds” for living in a broken world, and invite readers to return again and again as they grow in wisdom.
Together, Christine and Olivia reflect on reading as a relational and formative act, one that happens best in a community of trust, conversation, and shared attention. Olivia offers the images of mirrors, windows, and doors as a way of understanding how books help students see themselves, encounter others, and enter experiences beyond their own. The conversation also considers the breadth of the Great Conversation, not as a narrow inheritance for a few, but as a living tradition shaped by many voices and offered for the formation of all.
Festival as a Way of Life: Father Nathan Carr on Joy, Time, and Christian Formation
What would it mean to practice festival at home, in school, and in church? In this episode of Forged, Brian Williams speaks with Father Nathan Carr about the posture and practice of festival as a way of living with joy, gratitude, and holy attention in the midst of ordinary time. Drawing from his work as priest, headmaster, husband, father, and author of Festive School, Carr reflects on Christian calendars, prayer books, school feasts, household rituals, and the slow formation of children who learn not merely to observe the good, but to receive and name it. This conversation is an invitation to recover joy as discipline, delight as formation, and celebration as a serious part of Christian life.
Together, Brian and Father Carr consider how homes, schools, and churches can resist anxiety, urgency, cynicism, and suspicion by learning to inhabit time differently. From Benedictine hours and red-letter feast days to hidden Wise Men during Advent and children serving in the liturgy, this episode explores the small, concrete practices that teach us to see the world as gift.
The Harmony of the Parts: on Beauty, Place, and Belonging
What does beauty have to do with the spaces where we learn, teach, worship, and gather? In this shared bonus episode of Composed and Forged, Christine Perrin speaks with Brian Williams about Templeton Hall, the home of the Templeton Honors College, and the deep work of making a place that feels whole, hospitable, and human. Their conversation moves from architecture and furniture to poetry, asking how beauty forms us before we can fully explain what it has done. This is an episode about attention, creation, community, and the grace of places that help us to belong and to overcome the rootlessness of our times.
Brian reflects on the making of Templeton Hall at Eastern University as an act of stewardship, one that honors the old while creating room for students and faculty to dwell together in the pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful. Christine and Brian consider why beauty is not a luxury, why material places matter to Christian formation, and how the experience of a beautiful space creates harmony. The episode closes fittingly with Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” a poem of praise for the dappled, particular, and creaturely world.
Living Inside Language with Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel
What does it mean to compose a life through Sabbath rest, faithful work, and the patient practice of language? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel, a poet, translator, teacher, and director of the English program at Shalem College in Jerusalem, about the patterns that have shaped her life as a mother, writer, citizen, and friend. Their conversation moves from a childhood formed by trust and moral responsibility, to the weekly reset of Shabbat, to the strange and beautiful labor of translating the Book of Job. Along the way, Annie reflects on Hebrew, Palestinian Arabic, friendship across fracture, and the need to remain questioning without becoming cynical.
The conversation also touches on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Little Virtues,” Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, the Ethics of the Fathers, and the enduring hope that virtues can persist even in periods of historical grief and uncertainty.
What does distance running teach us about the body, failure, and the long work of becoming whole? In this episode of Forged, Brian Williams speaks with American distance running legend Sara Hall about the discipline and delight of a life spent running, competing, recovering, parenting, and learning to receive her identity from God rather than performance. On her 43rd birthday, Sara reflects on more than twenty-five years in elite running, the injuries and disappointments that reshaped her, the joy of competition when it is rightly ordered, and the deeper love that has sustained her through the grind.
The conversation also turns toward family, marriage, adoption, Ethiopia, and the work Sara and Ryan Hall have pursued through the Hall Steps Foundation. Sara offers a grounded picture of vocation in motion: a life shaped by training, service, sleep, dinner around the table, and the steady grace of being loved apart from achievement.
James LaGrand on Making a Home for Books, Beauty, and Belonging
What does it mean to build a culture of intellectual friendship, one shaped by books, music, meals, memory, and shared attention? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with historian and colleague, James LaGrand, about the habits that form students and teachers into a genuine community of learning. Their conversation moves from violin lessons and hymns to Augustine, Dante, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Tyehimba Jess, and the Sunday dinner table. Together they consider education not merely as competence or achievement, but as the patient formation of persons who can receive beauty, honor the past, and seek the good in company with others.
LaGrand describes his work in Messiah University’s Honors Program as the building and protecting of a culture, rather than the management of a program. Through seminars, shared meals, walks, tea, concerts, trips to Gettysburg, and the reading of great texts aloud, he invites students into patterns of attention that join the life of the mind to friendship and delight. The episode closes with a tribute to Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, and with the quiet image of a grandmother’s Sabbath table as a pattern for a life of hospitality and care.
Mentioned in the Episode
Olio by Tyehimba Jess | https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/olio
Tyehimba Jess | https://www.tyehimbajess.net/books.html
Makers by Nature: Bruce Herman on Art, Beauty, and the Call to Create
What is art for, and why does beauty awaken deep longings within us? In this conversation, Brian Williams joins artist, Bruce Herman, in his studio to explore the human calling to create, the role beauty plays in shaping the soul, and the discipline of learning to see. Herman argues that we are not merely consumers but makers by nature, and that art at its best is a form of hospitality that invites others into a meaningful encounter. Through stories of childhood wonder, reflections on modern art, and the language of longing, this episode offers a compelling vision of everyday creativity, from painting and poetry to spreadsheets and shared meals.
“Classical education introduces students into a tradition of inquiry that explores the enduring human questions in deep and beautiful ways.”
Dr. Brian Williams
Stay Oriented
Occasional stories, reflections, and resources to support your exploration of classical education.
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