This week marks the beginning of the new academic year at Ralston College. We have been delighted to welcome into the Humanities MA program — and onto the island of Samos in Greece — our fifth cohort.
This group of 26 students has entered our community with the courageous commitment and open-minded excitement that the College desires and demands. They bring a remarkable range of backgrounds: mathematicians, philosophers, classicists, poets, carpenters, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, and financial professionals, with experience spanning historic restoration, theology, political research, AI storytelling, counseling, accounting, and classical education. They come to Ralston from Princeton, Harvard, Hillsdale, Villanova, USC, the University of Dallas, the American College of the Building Arts, and beyond. Between them, they bring languages from Ancient Greek and Latin to Arabic, Russian, Norwegian, Turkish, Korean, and Nepali, and experience everywhere from the U.S. Navy and BlackRock to the Jordan Peterson Podcast, orchestras, choirs, classrooms, and film sets.
For these new students the initial climb is steep — not just metaphorically, in learning Ancient and Modern Greek from their first elements, but quite literally, as students climbed up the marble face of Mount Kerkis to find the cave of Panagia Makrini, guarded by a church whose origins date back to the ninth century, when it was founded in this remote and beautiful location by the ascetic monk Pavlos Latrinos.
There Dr Joseph Conlon delivered the first lecture of the year, exploring the many ways in which caves were deeply symbolic for the Ancient Greeks: as places not just of darkness away from the light, but also of profound insight away from external distractions; as places of communion with the divine; as gateways between life and death; and as places that allow for temporary retreat and safety but ultimately require emergence into the world outside. As our students take their first immersive dive into learning Greek by the direct method — while also diving into the Greek waters that wash against our classroom — they are reminded of the beauty inherent in challenging human faculties to the full. Χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά, as we so often say: the beautiful things are difficult.
