Composed: Timeless Ways of Living
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.
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Fighting for the Real: Jeanne Schindler on Presence, Technology, and the Life We Share
What does it take to remain fully human in an age of distraction? In this conversation, Christine Perrin speaks with Dr. Jeanne Schindler about attention, technology, homeschooling, civic life, and the quiet disciplines that help us fight for what is real. Together they consider how modern devices flatten experience, weaken our sense of place, and make presence harder to practice, while also pointing toward a better way, one rooted in community life, embodied friendship, serious thought, and shared public spaces. This is a conversation about recovering the habits that make a human life deep, relational, and truly lived. Drawing from her own intellectual formation, Dr. Schindler reflects on childhood influences, her shift from history to political theory, her decision to leave tenure and devote herself more fully to home and family, and the rewards of lifelong learning through homeschooling. She and Christine also explore AI, the limits of technology, the strain placed on civic discourse, and why restlessness should not always be medicated by screens, but instead received as a summons to seek truth, communion, and a richer form of life.
Patterns That Make Us Alive: Timothy Patitsas on Beauty, Learning, and Home
What makes a place, a school, or a daily life feel truly human? In this conversation, Christine Perrin and Timothy Patitsas explore beauty first living, the “quality without a name” described by Christopher Alexander, and the patterns that help people feel at home, at ease, and fully alive. Together they consider paper routes, classrooms, liturgical seasons, friendship, motherhood, teaching, and the built world, asking how living patterns form the soul and why beauty is not an ornament to life but one of its deepest truths. This episode is an invitation to notice the forms of life that nourish wonder, awaken desire for the good, and help us belong more deeply to the world. Their conversation moves from childhood memory to architecture, pedagogy, eros, ritual, and community. Along the way, Timothy reflects on the difference between potent information and quality information, the role of stories in shaping desire, and the kinds of educational practices that help students encounter truth not only analytically, but with their whole persons.
Motherhood and the Dignity of Dependence
Dependence is not a defect, it is part of what it means to be human. In this episode, our Host, Christine Perrin speaks with Leah Libresco about The Dignity of Dependence and the modern illusion that freedom means self-sufficiency. Together they explore why equality does not require sameness, how women’s lives reveal truths our culture tries to ignore, and why asking for help may be one of the most human things we can do. From sourdough and ballroom dancing to caregiving, marriage, disability, and friendship, this conversation offers a richer vision of love, responsibility, and shared life. It is a thoughtful and hopeful episode for anyone seeking a more humane way to live.
Learning to See: Attention as Participation
In this episode, Lynette Hull invites us into a conversation about art, faith, and the quiet transformation that can happen when the two meet. With warmth and wisdom, she reflects on creativity as a spiritual practice and on the ways beauty can draw us deeper into meaning and connection. It’s a thoughtful and inspiring exchange that will leave you curious to see the world, and perhaps your own creative life, a little differently.
Bearing Life, Bearing one Another
In this thoughtful episode, Christine sits down with writer and educator Agnes Howard for a rich conversation about motherhood, community, and what it means to share in the human experience. Together, they reflect on the deeper significance of pregnancy, the cultural pressures surrounding work and family life, and the beauty of living in meaningful connection with others. With warmth and insight, Howard invites listeners to reconsider familiar assumptions and to see everyday life as something both communal and deeply significant.
Mothering in the Midst of Others Who Enlarge Us
What does it mean to build a school and a life shaped by community, conviction, and daily rhythms of grace? In this episode, Madeleine Hewitt, Assistant Head of School at Claritas Classical Christian Academy, shares her journey through education, motherhood, and mentorship, and how each has shaped the other. She reflects on the challenges of idealism, the power of guiding principles, and the formative role of liturgy in everyday life. Madeleine closes by reading Gerard Manley Hopkins beautifully, capturing the wonder and weight of it all.
Living Patterns and How We Learn Them
In this episode of Composed, Emily Maeda describes the living patterns in her life passed down from her own mother that have helped her in raising her children, starting a school, and designing gardens for now and for posterity.