Leland Ryken:
Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective

released 1/1/1991

Throughout history, great literature has been a cohesive force in Western culture. It interprets our experiences and tells us the truth about our fears and longings. It is a catalyst to our thinking and an invaluable index to the minds and feelings of people around us. In Realms of Gold, Leland Ryken proceeds chronologically through some of his most favorite classics, from Homer to Shakespeare and Milton to Tolstoy and Camus, offering not only a taste of the classics, but a framework in which to analyze them. For students studying literature, this book serves as an introduction to the classics as friends; for those who read the classics a long time ago, it is a motivation to renew delightful acquaintances; and for people already intimate with these works, it offers the opportunity to deepen their understanding within a Christian context.

Read by Ken Myers.

8 hours 30 minutes

Related reading and listening

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Tags:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 minutes)
  • The wide, wide resonance of local details — Novelist Larry Woiwode on the unbreakable bond between specificity and universality
  • The poetic power of hymnody — Leland Ryken argues for reading hymns as devotional poetry, that we might have constant access to their spiritual insights and that they might help nurture and shape us into disciples. (12 minutes)
  • The Liberal Arts tradition, II — context and extension — Kevin Clark explains how the book he co-authored defines a framework in which the Trivium and the Quadrivium are the core of a curriculum that includes piety, gymnastics, music, philosophy, and theology. (20 minutes)
  • The Liberal Arts tradition, I — science and harmony — Ravi Scott Jain discusses the place of the Quadrivium — the four mathematical arts — within the larger framework of the classical approach to education. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The artist’s commitment to truth — Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy. (18 minutes)
  • Sustaining a heritage of wisdom — Louise Cowan (1916–2015) explains how the classics reach the deep core of our imagination and teach us to order our loves according to the wholeness of reality. (16 minutes)
  • Recovering natural philosophy — Science teacher Ravi Scott Jain discusses natural philosophy, the “love of wisdom in the realm of nature,” as the overarching discipline in the sciences. (21 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 91 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Hugh Brogan, Daniel Ritchie, Daniel Walker Howe, George McKenna, and Patrick Deneen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
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  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 125 — FEATURED GUESTS: Brent Hull, David Koyzis, Steve Wilkens, Roger Lundin, Craig Bernthal, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 119 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mary Eberstadt, Allan Bevere, Peter J. Leithart, Steven Boyer, Karen Dieleman, and Peter Phillips
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
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  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • Literature for wisdom, not propaganda —
    FROM VOL. 23
    Daniel Ritchie provides a constructive alternative to the ideological captivity of literature and literary studies. (13 minutes)
  • In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • How literature becomes a habit — Flannery O’Connor exhorts English teachers to maintain high standards
  • Freedom and equality according to Flannery O’Connor — Three guests discuss Flannery O’Connor’s ideas: Henry T. Edmondson, III, on O’Connor’s understanding of political life; Ralph C. Wood, on O’Connor as a “hillbilly Thomist”; and Susan Srigley, on O’Connor’s sacramental and incarnational fiction. (18 minutes)
  • Flannery O’Connor and Thomistic philosophy — Fr. Damian Ference explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy, as evidenced by her reading habits, letters, prayer journal, and, of course, essays and fiction. (48 minutes)
  • Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux —
    FROM VOL. 147
    Biographer and priest Patrick Samway talks about the relationship between fiction writer Flannery O’Connor and the legendary editor Robert Giroux. (21 minutes)
  • Feelings made articulate — Glenn C. Arbery on poetry and the intelligibility of the inner life
  • Faulkner’s tragic vision — Alan Jacobs describes how William Faulkner’s fiction explored the tragedy of living with a legacy of evil acts. (26 minutes)
  • Experiencing literature in its wholeness —
    FROM VOL. 50
    Glenn Arbery uses the analogies of sports fandom and ritual to explain how a “long habituation” in learning about form in literature enables one to enter into a greater depth of experience of reality through literature. (26 minutes)
  • Engaging the sound of ancient wisdom — Monique Neal explains how learning an ancient language as a spoken, living one enriches one's experience of reading original texts. (21 minutes)
  • Education and human be-ing in the world — In championing a classical approach to teaching, Stratford Caldecott was an advocate for a musical education, affirming the harmonious unity in Creation. (26 minutes)
  • Communion of saints — Jessica Hooten Wilson asserts that reading stories of holiness in the lives of “literary saints” helps to cultivate Christian character in us. (25 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)