The Christopher Perrin Show
by Christopher Perrin
Dr. Christopher Perrin has been a leader in the renewal of classical education in the United States for 25 years. In this podcast, he traces the renewal of the American paideia exploring the recent history of the American renaissance in light of the 2500 years that have preceded it. Christopher is the founding CEO of Classical Academic Press and the founder of ClassicalU.com. The Christopher Perrin Show is part of the TrueNorth.fm podcast network.
Episodes
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Episode 66: Rekindling the Flame: Jamie Burns and the Renewal of Classical Education in the UK
In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes Jamie Burns, founder and chief executive of the Fellowship for Classical Learning, a charity organization building a network of classical Christian independent schools in the United Kingdom. They discuss the renewal of...
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Episode 65: From Wonder to Wisdom: The Classical Journey of Education
In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin reflects on wisdom as one of the chief aims of classical and liberal education. Beginning with practical wisdom, or phronesis and prudentia, he asks whether the young can become wise before age and experience have done their slow...
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Episode 64: Passing the Torch: Louis Markos on the Classical Christian Inheritance
In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. Louis Markos for a wide-ranging conversation about the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian legacy and the renewal of classical Christian education. Markos traces how his Greek heritage, early love for Homer and Plato, Jewish...
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Episode 63: From Wonder to Mastery: The Story of Novare Science
In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes John Mays to tell the story of his vocation as a teacher, writer, and founder of Novare Science. Mays traces his winding path from electrical engineering and recording-studio work to public school teaching, graduate study...
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Episode 62: Raising Sturdy Kids: Why Children Need Struggle, Courage, and Truth
Description In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes Keith McCurdy and Davies Owens for a conversation about Raising Sturdy Kids, Keith’s new book on forming strong families and capable children. McCurdy argues that children today are not naturally sturdier than...
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Episode 61: Hildegard College: Restoring Polymathy and Redemptive Entrepreneurship
Description Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. Matthew J. Smith, founder of Hildegard College, to discuss why he left a tenure-track literature career to build a deliberately small, relationship-centered “micro college” in Southern California. Smith describes modern higher education as expensive,...
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Episode 60: A Living Tradition: Classical Education Without Nostalgia
Description Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. John Mark Reynolds for a extensive conversation about the renewal of classical education—and why the term classical often confuses more than it clarifies. Reynolds shares how family life, great teachers, and deep reading (especially C. S. Lewis and…
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Episode 59: American Education: What It Was and Can Be Again
Description Recorded at the 2026 Great Hearts National Symposium on February 25, 2026, this edited episode features Christopher Perrin’s keynote speech exploring the history, meaning, and renewal of classical education, asking a foundational question: what exactly are we trying to recover?…
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Episode 58: The Divided Soul and the Prodigal Pattern: Duty, Desire, and the Way Home
Description Christopher Perrin welcomes author and speaker Heidi White to discuss her book The Divided Soul and the inner conflict so many people experience between duty and desire. Along the way, Perrin draws on his own work, The Good Teacher, to frame how educators can unite discipline and...
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Episode 57: Remembering Well: Restoring History Through Sympathy, Story, and Place
Description Andrew Zwerneman, writer and narrator for HISTORY250® and co-founder and president of Cana Academy, joins Christopher Perrin to argue that America’s cultural crisis is, at root, a crisis of memory—and that renewing history education is a work of restoration. Zwerneman traces the...
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Episode 56: A Nice Definition of Classical Education: The Language, Metaphors, and Meaning Behind “Classical”
Description Christopher Perrin explores why “classical education” is both widely used and widely misunderstood—and why the language we choose matters. He surveys common assumptions people attach to the word classical (Greek and Roman history, Great Books, elitism, Eurocentrism) and explains why…
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Episode 55: From Fragmentation to Fellowship: The Intellectual Renewal Behind Classical Education
Description David Diener, Assistant Professor of Education at Hillsdale College and president of The Alcuin Fellowship, joins Christopher Perrin to reflect on how a philosopher’s training can become a vocational doorway into the renewal of classical education. Drawing from years in K–12 school...
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Episode 54: The Festive School: Prayer, Feasts, and the Recovery of Wonder
Description Father Nathan Carr, Headmaster of The Academy and often dubbed “the Jack Sparrow of classical education,” joins Christopher Perrin to recount his unexpected path into classical Christian school leadership—and the hard-won lessons of building a flourishing school culture over two...
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Episode 53: Teaching Toward Truth as a Living Reality
In this reflective episode, Christopher Perrin interviewed Andrew Kern, his long-time colleague and friend, President and CEO of The CiRCE Institute, in a wide-ranging conversation about the philosophy and practice of teaching. They delve into the meaning of truth—what it is, how it’s often...
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Episode 52: Memory and the Music of Language: A Conversation with Grant Horner and Karen Moore
In this memorable episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher welcomes Dr. Grant Horner and Karen Moore—two veteran classical educators and authors—for a spirited conversation about the power of language, memory, and the poetic imagination in Christian classical education. Together, they...
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Episode 51: Common Humanity at the Crossroads: A Conversation with Dr. Angel Parham
In this special episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher welcomes Dr. Angel Parham, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and co-author of The Black Intellectual Tradition. Together, they explore the often-overlooked legacy of classical learning in the Black intellectual...
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Episode 50: Sing to Learn: Recovering the Ancient Art of Musical Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin gives a foretaste from his forthcoming book with Carrie Eben, The Good Teacher, as he advocates for singing as a powerful and now neglected pedagogical tool. Drawing from traditional sources like Plato and Augustine, Scripture, and personal anecdotes, he explores how...
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Episode 49: What Is Virtue? Recovering a Lost Vocabulary of Education
In this episode, Dr. Christopher Perrin draws upon his forthcoming book with Carrie Eben, The Good Teacher and invites listeners to reconsider the meaning of virtue. It once stood at the heart of education but now often eludes clear definitions. Considering personal experience and the broader...
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Episode 48: Embodied Learning: Cultivating Beauty in Classical Education
In this episode, Dr. Christopher Perrin explores the often-neglected role of beauty in classical education, emphasizing the importance of engaging all five senses in the learning experience. He challenges the text-centered focus of modern education and invites educators to rethink school...
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Episode 47: Balancing Rigor and Rest: A Classical Approach to Education
In this episode, Dr. Christopher Perrin explores the tension between rigor and rest in classical education, drawing on Aristotle’s concept of virtue as a balance between extremes. He examines how rigor is often emphasized as a corrective to declining academic standards but warns against its...
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Episode 46: The Good Teacher: Principles Over Techniques
Great teaching isn’t about mastering techniques—it’s about embodying principles. In this episode, Dr. Christopher Perrin explores how classical education prioritizes the formation of virtue in both teachers and students through time-tested pedagogical wisdom and Christian tradition. Using the...
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Episode 45: Going Home with Odysseus
In this episode, Christopher Perrin explores the profound theme of the hero's arduous journey home—as depicted in Homer's The Odyssey. He discusses how Odysseus's return to Ithaca not only signifies a physical homecoming but also a reclaiming of identity and status. Consider in this epic tale the...
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Episode 44: What We Can Learn from Odysseus, the Man of Many Twists and Turns: The Pros and Cons of Being Curious and Clever
In this episode, Dr. Perrin who teaches the Odyssey to a college class every year, traces the life and quest of Odysseus noting the ways in which his life turns and twists much like our own, and the way his yearning and the story itself anticipate a kind of fulfillment in the life and ministry of...
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Episode 43: 20 Words You Must Know to Understand Education: What Education Really Is
In this episode, Dr. Perrin notes the ways we have forgotten the meaning of words that related to education and revives the meaning of about 20 key words we need to know in order to better understand what education really is.
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Episode 42: Education as Hospitality and Healing
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes the way that Christian classical education must offer hospitality to students seeking an intellectual home and healing to the sickness of their souls. While this is not the whole of a robust classical education, it is integral and vital part. (Also with...
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Episode 41: Scholé over Schooling: Learning to be Mary in a Society of Martha
In this episode, Dr. Perrin discusses the difficulty and the importance of keeping with classical learning throughout the entirety of a student's education, and of finding times to be wisdom-seeking Mary in a society that expects everyone to be always-busy Martha.
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Episode 40: The Best Teacher is a Good Book
In this episode Dr. Perrin considers this traditional maxim. Can authors and their books become meaningful teachers and even life-long friends? What is the link between an author and authority? Do we still need living teachers if we have really good books?
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Episode 39: Education for the Next Life
In this episode, Dr. Perrin traces that part of the Christian tradition of education that regarded education as a preparation not only for one's earthly life but ultimately for the next, heavenly life. Can such a heavenly focus be of real, earthly merit? The tradition says yes.
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Episode 38: Repetition Is the Mother of Memory: The Permanent Learning of Petition
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes the pedagogical maximum of Repetitio Mater Memoriae, noting that repetition can be a delightful activity of seeking and experiencing the same good thing again and again until it is permanently possessed.
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Episode 37: Multum non Multa: The Pedagogical Principle of Going Deep
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes the ways that teaching a few things deeply and well accelerates learning much better than by superficially covering or skimming over content.
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Episode 36: Festina Lente (Make Haste Slowly): The Pedagogical Maxim of Mastering Each Step
In this episode, Dr. Perrin retrieves and describes one of the most essential pedagogical principles every teacher should employ--the art of going farther and faster by going slower.
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Episode 35: John Henry Newman and True Education
What is an educated mind? Newman says the mature mind "discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another." In this episode, Dr. Perrin...
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Episode 34: Cutting School: Why Classical Schools Fragment Education and Turn Learning into Subjects
In this episode, Dr. Perrin laments the ways that classical schools, like progressives schools, regularly "cut up" the curriculum into too many disconnected fragments that become "subjects."
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Episode 33: Piling It On: Why Classical Schools Have Too Many Periods and Teach Too Many Subjects
In this episode, Dr. Perrin explains the why classical schools still retain elements of their progressive counterparts and simply try to teach too much.
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Episode 32: Friendship and Community in Education (Featuring Davies Owens)
In this episode, Davies Owens (from Basecamp Live) and I co-host the podcast and talk about the ways friendship and fellowship should be at the heart of classical education.
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Episode 31: Powerful Education in the Great Tradition
In this episode Christopher Perrin discusses how formative and powerful a great education can be. Tradition is formative but a great tradition is transformative.
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Episode 30: The Two Canons: The Biblical Books and the Great Books
It took a long while to fix the canon of Scripture; it also takes a while to determine that a book is truly a Great Book. Dr. Perrin argues that the process by which both canons are established is similar.
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Episode 29: The Virtue of Faith
In this episode, Dr. Perrin continues to explore faith as a theological virtue.
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Episode 28: The Theological Virtues
In this episode, Dr. Perrin explores how theological virtues such as faith, hope, and love complement the four cardinal virtues.
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Episode 27: The Cardinal Virtue of Justice
In this episode Dr. Perrin describes justice as the virtue that enable us to act properly and fairly after having accurately perceived what is real, or the true state of affairs.
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Episode 25: The Virtue of Prudence (Part Two): False Prudence
In this episode Dr. Perrin describes how prudence can become falsified so that we are not able to perceive what is truly real.
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Episode 24: The Virtue of Prudence (Part One): True Prudence
In this episode Dr. Perrin describes how prudence was the chief, governing virtues among the all of the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.
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Episode 23: The Virtue of Fortitude in Teaching
In this episode, Dr. Perrin continues exploring the virtue of fortitude and he discusses the fortitude that is necessary to be a teacher.
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Episode 22: The Virtue of Fortitude in Classical Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin discusses the virtue of fortitude in classical education and how it relates to teaching.
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Episode 21: The Importance of Shakespeare in Classical Education, Part II
In this episode, Dr. Perrin continues his discussion with Tim McIntosh, a former professor at Gutenberg College and a current creative director, actor, and playwright. They discuss the importance of Shakespeare and other great authors in classical education, and particularly how plays and other...
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Episode 20: The Importance of Shakespeare in Classical Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin talks with Tim McIntosh, a former professor at Gutenberg College and a current creative director, actor, and playwright. They discuss the importance of Shakespeare and other great authors in classical education, and particularly how plays and other creative outlets...
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Episode 19: The Importance of Temperance in Life and Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes the importance of temperance in everyday life and in education.
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Episode 18: The Importance of Friendship in Life and Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes the importance of friendship in everyday life and in education.
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Episode 17: Metaphors in Classical Education
In this episode, Dr. Perrin describes how metaphors can be used to understand classical education.
About this show
Dr. Christopher Perrin has been a leader in the renewal of classical education in the United States for 25 years. In this podcast, he traces the renewal of the American paideia exploring the recent history of the American renaissance in light of the 2500 years that have preceded it. Christopher is the founding CEO of Classical Academic Press and the founder of ClassicalU.com. The Christopher Perrin Show is part of the TrueNorth.fm podcast network.
Hosted by
Christopher Perrin