What Does Classical Formation Look Like?
This short film offers a glimpse into how students are formed through daily practices of learning, attention, and care.
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.
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.
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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.