Composed: Timeless Ways of Living

Humanitas Institute
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Education

Composed: A timeless way of living. A podcast for women exploring living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.

  1. 3d ago

    Preparation and Fulfillment: The Family and the Christian Imagination

    What if composing a meaningful life begins not with finding the perfect routine, but with learning to love and practice the good things already in front of us? In this episode of Composed: Timeless Ways of Living, Christine Perrin talks with Rebecca Jekel about music shared across generations, the preparation that makes feasting possible, the rhythms of the Church, and the stories of women in Scripture. Their conversation explores how ordinary practices like singing, reading, cooking, hospitality, and gathering with others can become patterns of formation. Rebecca offers an encouraging vision for families who feel pressure to optimize every activity: what we genuinely love, faithfully practiced and generously shared, can become part of the inheritance we give our children. Rebecca also reflects on Scripture as a story of preparation, fall, return, and fulfillment. Through Eve, Sarah, Miriam, Rahab, Ruth, Deborah, Photini, and Mary, she considers the courage, faith, hospitality, and perseverance woven through salvation history. For anyone longing for more structure or meaning in daily life, her invitation is refreshingly concrete: begin with small, learnable practices, especially the domestic arts, and allow their simple cycles of preparation and enjoyment to teach you how a life is composed. Nothing happens outside this rhythm in a family, in the life we make, and in the historic redemptive arc.  About the GuestRebecca Jekel is a mother and grandmother with interests in music, stories, and personality patterns. She lives in a quiet empty nest with her husband and works in home care providing people with companionship and help with activities of daily living. When not working, Rebecca reads, writes, sings, gathers with family and friends, and follows discussions on writing craft and personality theory. Rebecca most often finds beauty and perspective in the arts, the Church’s Liturgy and teachings, observing children and animals, and learning people’s stories one-on one. Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    Preparation and Fulfillment: The Family and the Christian Imagination

  2. Oct 12

    Relational Education: Love, Friendship, Attention and Return with Grant Holbrook

    What if some of the most formative patterns in a life begin with simple obligations, reading the same book again, walking the dog each morning, showing up for students, or staying rooted in one place? Christine Perrin talks with teacher Grant Holbrook about the relationships and repeated practices that quietly shape a person over time. Their conversation moves through Augustine, the Psalms, friendship, beauty, teaching, and the connection between knowledge and love. Along the way, Grant considers why education is deeply relational, why older students need responsibilities to younger ones, and how good books can become lifelong companions. For parents and teachers wondering what habits truly help form a human being, this conversation offers a hopeful picture of a life shaped through attention, fidelity, and love. Grant also shares practical patterns from his own life, including memorizing the Psalms while walking his dog, rereading great books under the helpful pressure of obligation, and taking time with former students who return, to walk, talk, and continue learning. About the GuestGrant Holbrook and his family live in Richmond, Virginia, where he is an upper school teacher at Veritas School. He spends most of his classroom time with the oldest students, teaching Rhetoric, Theology, and Biblical Hebrew to juniors and seniors. His graduate and doctoral work was in Old Testament, and his dissertation considered the poetry and ethics of the Hebrew acrostic Psalms. The works of Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, and St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo propel much of his current reading and writing. The Holbrooks are members of Church Hill Presbyterian, atop the oldest and loveliest neighborhood in the city. Guest LinksChastity as the Power to Love: A Discussion as Parents and Teachers https://classicalu.com/courses/chastity-as-the-power-to-love-a-discussion-as-parents-and-teachers/ Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    Relational Education: Love, Friendship, Attention and Return with Grant Holbrook

  3. Sep 28

    The Life An Education Makes with Elspeth Currie

    What if the books you read at sixteen, the habits you formed in a classroom, or the things you learned simply because they were beautiful were never meant to “pay off” only in a career? Christine Perrin talks with historian Elspeth Currie about education as lifelong formation, and about the ways learning can shape motherhood, family culture, work, and our capacity for attention and enjoyment. Drawing on Currie’s research into educated women in Renaissance England, they explore why learning matters even when its effects cannot be measured, how good books and thoughtful teachers shape us over time, and why practices like reading aloud, Sabbath rest, community, and celebration can keep us from simply drifting through family life. It is a conversation that recognizes the good work that might  already be unfolding in ordinary life. About the Guest Elspeth Currie is a PhD candidate in history at Boston College, where she studies women and Latin in Renaissance England. She holds a BA in History and Classical Studies from Gordon College and a MSt in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford. Prior to her doctorate, she taught Latin and history in a classical Christian school. She is the author and translator of To Marvel More: Holy Attention in the Incarnation Poems of Martha Marchina, a Christmas devotional on the Latin poetry of a seventeenth-century Italian woman. Elspeth and her family make their home on Boston’s North Shore.Guest Links Elspeth Currie at Boston College | https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/history/people/graduate-students/elspeth-currie.html To Marvel More | https://a.co/d/0c9g6eJq Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    The Life An Education Makes with Elspeth Currie

  4. Sep 14

    What the Seasons Can Teach Us About Work, Rest, and Raising Children with Kerry Hasler-Brooks

    What if a flourishing family life depends less on doing more and more on recovering rhythms of work, rest, attention, and belonging? Christine Perrin talks with Dr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks about the life she and her family have built on a small Pennsylvania farm, where agricultural seasons make limits, dependence, and renewal impossible to ignore. Their conversation explores how parents can create room for boredom, Sabbath, reading, meaningful work, and life together, even without radically rearranging their circumstances. Kerry also reflects on technology, simplicity, literature, and the formative power of returning to the same places and texts over time. For families feeling crowded by schedules and competing demands, this conversation offers a hopeful vision of choosing what to value and making space to live accordingly. Along the way, Kerry considers the sustaining power of literature, from Zora Neale Hurston to Emily Dickinson, and the way reading can help us attend more deeply to ourselves, one another, the natural world, and God. Her reflections suggest that formation often happens through ordinary practices repeated faithfully: walking the same ground, rereading a beloved poem, sharing work with children, welcoming others, and protecting stretches of time in which nothing has been planned. About the GuestDr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks researches and teaches the literary history of American life, with a particular focus on race and gender, from Phyllis Wheatley to Marilynne Robinson, Sherwood Anderson to Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville to Toni Morrison. In her work, Dr. Hasler-Brooks pursues engaged pedagogy, literary reading as spiritual practice, and literary studies toward Christian vocation. She believes stories speak truth and can teach all of us to be the creative thinkers, engaged communicators, perceptive readers, and responsible writers the world needs. Kerry lives with her husband and two children on a small, sustainable farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania where they toil together to produce organically-grown fruits, vegetables, and flowers for families in their CSA program, at local farmers markets, and through collaborations with local non-profit organizations. Connect with the Humanitas Institute Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.org X | https://x.com/HIClassicalEd Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/ TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070 YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    What the Seasons Can Teach Us About Work, Rest, and Raising Children with Kerry Hasler-Brooks

  5. Aug 31

    Living Like a Human with Elizabeth Lynn

    What helps a child learn, a family flourish, or a community grow strong? Elizabeth Lynn suggests that the answer often begins with things that can seem almost invisible: order, repeated rhythms, presence, attention, and the willingness to delight in one another. In conversation with Christine Perrin, Elizabeth reflects on the “liturgy” of a classroom, the surprising gift of being known by name, and why beauty and rest depend on patterns that make room for genuine learning. She also considers the challenge many families know well: how to cultivate an inner life when the tempo of the world refuses to slow down. For Elizabeth, Scripture has become a lifelong anchor, calling her again and again toward humility, stillness, gratitude, and a life attentive to God and neighbor. Their conversation offers parents and educators a hopeful picture of formation. The small practices of showing up, praying for people by name, making room for wonder, and refusing to let busyness dictate our deepest commitments can slowly shape the atmosphere of a home, classroom, and community. It is a vision closely aligned with the Humanitas Institute’s commitment to education as formation through relationship, beauty, truth, goodness, and wonder. About the GuestElizabeth Lynn serves as the Upper School Dean at Covenant Christian Academy (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) and as an adjunct instructor in Christian Ethics at Messiah University. Elizabeth focused on Biblical studies in her undergraduate program and went on to earn a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (South Hamilton, MA) and a Doctor of Ministry from Denver Seminary. She and her husband, Paul, have been married for 32 years and have five children. Instagram: Covenant Christian Academy Harrisburg Facebook: Covenant Christian Academy Leading with Wisdom: The Vision of a Classical Dean– Humanitas Institute Feature Film: https://humanitasinstitute.org/resources/videos/leading-with-wisdom-the-vision-of-a-classical-dean/ Connect with the Humanitas Institute Humanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    Living Like a Human with Elizabeth Lynn

  6. Aug 17

    Beauty Is Not a Luxury with Nadezhda Gribkova

    What we attend to quietly shapes the people we become. In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Nadezhda Gribkova about beauty-first education, the patient work of looking, and the relationships that make genuine learning possible. Drawing on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams, Jane Jacobs, sacred icons, and her own experiences as a student and teacher, Nadezhda explores why formation cannot be reduced to transferring information. Her own education, as a fifteen year old in a new country, significantly shaped her life. Her teachers, she explains, took her seriously by tackling difficult books in conversation and asking good questions toward the person she would be but was not yet. She offers simple practices for recovering attention, including memorizing poetry, observing art without rushing to interpret it, and returning to the patterns that remind us what is true. Their conversation invites parents and educators to consider how beauty can deepen family culture, strengthen human connection, and orient an ordinary life toward flourishing. At the heart of the conversation is a hopeful claim: beautiful things are not luxuries reserved for experts. They are gifts that can ground us, enlarge our vision, and help us remember how to live. About the Guest Originally from Moscow, Russia, Nadezhda Gribkova is a PhD student in the Slavic Department at the University of Chicago. She holds a graduate degree in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she studied modern and contemporary art. At UIC, she worked as a graduate lecturer before beginning her doctoral research at the University of Chicago. Her current work focuses on the interrelation of ethics and aesthetics in Soviet art and literature, tracing the formal and philosophical influences of pre-revolutionary religious traditions on the development of Soviet cultural practices. She has published on Soviet Modernism, Eastern European Conceptual art, and crypto art. She is currently working on two articles devoted respectively to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, examining the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic in their literary practices. She is also the creator of the Poetics Through Russian Art YouTube channel, an ongoing project dedicated to Russian literature, art history, and the role of aesthetics in contemporary life. Guest LinksNadezhda Gribkova’s Official Websitehttps://www.nadezhdagribkova.com/PORA: Poetics through Russian Art https://m.youtube.com/@PORA_poeticsthroughrussianart Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institutehttps://humanitasinstitute.orgXhttps://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagramhttps://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_institute Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070 YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    Beauty Is Not a Luxury with Nadezhda Gribkova

  7. Aug 3

    How Small Habits Fill a Life with Nadya Williams

    What if the life you long for is formed one teaspoon at a time? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with classicist, writer, and homeschooling mother Nadya Williams about the small patterns that fill a life: reading aloud on the couch, gathering friends around books and snacks, welcoming children into imperfect homes, and writing in the margins of family life.  Together they explore motherhood, Christian human dignity, education, AI, and the hope of building a humane culture through local, faithful, ordinary practices. For mothers who feel stretched thin and are hungry for wisdom, this conversation offers a gentle invitation to begin with one small good thing. About the GuestNadya Williams (PhD in Classics, Princeton University) is a homeschool mom, writer, and editor based in Ashland, Ohio, where she is Interim Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023), Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024), and Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan Academic, 2025). She is Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy, where she hosts the Christians Reading Classics Podcast. She is also a Contributor at Christianity Today, a Contributing Editor at Front Porch Republic and Providence Magazine, and Featured Author at Fairer Disputations. She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio. Substack | https://nadyawilliams.substack.com/ and https://badhomeschoolers.substack.com/ Website | https://www.nadyawilliams.com/Writing at The Dispatch | https://thedispatch.com/author/nadya-williams/Christians Reading Classics Podcast | https://mereorthodoxy.com/christians-reading-classicsX | https://x.com/NadyaWilliams81 Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok |  https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook |  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    How Small Habits Fill a Life with Nadya Williams

  8. Jul 20

    Jesse Hake on the Living Patterns of Reading, Naming, and Belonging

    What if the books we read aloud, the walks we take, and the names we learn for the world around us are not small extras, but central ways of forming a life? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Jesse Hake, Director of ClassicalU at Classical Academic Press, about reading as a family practice, literature as a companion in moral formation, and the quiet power of naming the places we inhabit. Their conversation moves from The Lord of the Rings and Dickens to creek stomping, wildflowers, classroom liturgies, and the simple discipline of calling one’s father. For parents and teachers seeking humane, practical ways to cultivate wisdom, attention, and delight, this episode offers a hopeful vision of education as shared life. Jesse reminds us that classical education is not merely a curriculum or a set of ideas. It is a way of receiving the world with love and giving that love to others through conversation, memory, making, and place. Reading aloud, walking attentively, and creating beautiful things together become patterns that nourish families, classrooms, and communities. About the GuestJesse Hake is director for the ClassicalU parent and teacher training platform at Classical Academic Press, where he has served since 2019. Before that, he was Principal for seven years at Logos Academy, a classical Christian school in downtown York, PA. Jesse holds a BA in history from Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and a Master of Letters in history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He has taught history, literature and theology at middle school, high school and college levels and currently teaches as an adjunct professor in the Messiah University honors program. He enjoys writing as well, with articles in The Christian Century, Front Porch Republic and his own essay newsletter at Copious Flowers. He lives with his wife and three children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Guest LinksClassicalU | https://classicalu.com/Copious Flowers | https://copiousflowers.substack.com/ClassicalU on Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/classicalupageClassicalU on LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/classicalu/ Connect with the Humanitas InstituteHumanitas Institute | https://humanitasinstitute.orgX | https://x.com/HIClassicalEdInstagram | https://www.instagram.com/humanitas_institute/TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@humanitas_instituteFacebook | https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588606585070YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanitasInstitute

    Jesse Hake on the Living Patterns of Reading, Naming, and Belonging
See All (22)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

Composed: A timeless way of living. A podcast for women exploring living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.

Information

You Might Also Like