MA

IN

THE

HUMANITIES

Applications are now open for the 2025-26 year of our Master's in the Humanities program. Apply by February 17, 2025 to ensure full consideration.

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Overview

Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities charts its course through Western civilization, from the Greek world of Homer, to Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe, into the Renaissance and up to our modern era. The setting of our four terms parallels this arc by beginning in Greece and then moving to Savannah, Georgia. The curriculum unites the most profound and provocative works of literature, philosophy, and art, inspiring and challenging students to approach the human condition with fresh eyes. Yet to cover this ground in a single year of intense intellectual study requires careful steering and selection. For 2025–26, that focus will be provided by the theme of “Fellowship,” which our multidisciplinary curriculum will trace through philosophy, music, architecture, art, and literature.

A rich tapestry of connections—biological, economic, ecological, affective, metaphysical, and spiritual—bind together the disparate elements of our world and allow for the emergence of a multitude of associations from the domestic to the civic, from the intimacy of friendship to the vast interdependencies of nations, from systems of commerce to the ecosystems of rainforests and oceans, and from the quiet communion of the individual with the transcendent to the boisterous unison of voices in song. In all these situations, we realize ourselves in and through our relations to one another and to the cosmos itself. Yet such connections are necessarily fragile and must be carefully cultivated and maintained; where they have been severed, they must be re-established. To study the theme of “Fellowship” is thus to study not only the rich relationality of all things, but also the conditions that allow for the survival of those relationships—namely, the practices of reconciliation, recovery, and repair. Moreover, it is to acknowledge those events—from births to marriages to foundings—that bring new relationships into being.

Program Structure

Term

I:

Greece

The Greek language and the spirit of Hellenism are the very threads that run through the Humanities, in all of their forms, as expressed across every epoch of the Western tradition. It is through the ancient Greeks that our civilization received its foundational accounts of political economy—from the oikos to the polis—and of the various bonds of duty and love, from eusebeia to eros, that tie us to one another and to the world around us.

For centuries, the ability to access the foundational texts of this inheritance directly—without translators, commentators, or other intermediaries—was a nearly universal prerequisite for the meaningful encounter with, and entry into, its cultural inheritance. It is for this reason that our program begins with an intensive language residency in Greece.

This innovative pedagogical module, which approaches every form of the Greek language simultaneously, enables the study of Greek texts over the three subsequent terms. Undertaking this ambitious project in Greece itself not only allows for complete linguistic immersion but also helps forge deep friendships through communal life as a cohort and through group excursions to some of the major cultural centers of the Hellenic world.

The Athenaeum, Ralston College Campus, Savannah

Terms

II,

III,

IV:

Savannah

Three terms in Savannah will then follow: we will focus first on the ancient world, then turn to the Middle Ages, and finally consider a range of achievements from post-medieval Europe through to our modern world. We will explore how conceptions of Fellowship develop and unfold across time as we consider works of philosophy, theology, and the creative and imaginative arts from each period.

Intense scrutiny of specific works will be paired with ambitious, wide-ranging surveys. We will supplement our studies with concerts, symposia, guest lectures, and other events that will enrich our main curricular program. Taken together, the academic itinerary of these terms and their chronological sequence will provide integrated knowledge—and experience—of the West’s intellectual, spiritual, and historical trajectory.

Our

MA

Students'

Own

Words

Explore the intellectual journeys of four recent graduates of our MA in the Humanities program. In the following videos, students reflect on why they enrolled, what they learned, and those they met along the way, revealing how Ralston’s curriculum spoke uniquely to their circumstances and interests.

Theme

Fellowship

In a cultural moment marked by fragmentation, disconnection, and alienation, both the challenge and the necessity of fellowship—and of the practices that enable and sustain it—is evident. At Ralston, we seek to realize the unique fellowship found in the co-legere—the reading together—that forms the bedrock of College life. Students will embark on an exciting and expansive project of reflecting on the forms of fellowship found across a rich array of disciplines, times, and cultures while also directly building collegiate fellowship through participation in Ralston College’s project of reviving and reinventing the university.

Questions about the essential nature of communal life and its various forms have been a perennial preoccupation in the West. We will explore these questions through an intensive engagement with key texts. How, for example, does Homer’s Iliad reveal tensions and accords between the ethical demands of particular tribal belonging and those of the universal human experience of suffering and loss? How are Aristotle and Plato’s accounts of the intimate fellowship of friendship and the wider fellowship of political life—understandings shaped by the life of the agora and the schole—transmitted and transformed by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, whose vision is shaped by the new forms of fellowship engendered by medieval forms of life like the monastery and the guild? What new visions of earthly community are brought into view by painters like Bruegel and Rembrandt in the wake of the Protestant Reformation? What might the betrayals in Shakespeare’s tragedies or the marriages in Jane Austen’s novels tell us about the possibilities and conditions for forgiveness and reconciliation? What new understandings of our fellowship with the natural world emerge in the works of American poets like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson and what possibilities for political belonging are revealed by the American project of democratic life, which harkens back not only in its laws but in its architecture to the structures of ancient Athenian democracy?

Through questions like these, students will conduct a searching and sustained inquiry into the networks of relationships that bind together and give meaning and purpose to our individual lives and pursuits. In the process, they will forge new bonds of fellowship that will nourish and sustain them as they are equipped with the habits of life and of mind that will prepare them to embark on future pursuits with courage, humility, and steadfastness.

Previous themes

Leonardo Da Vinci, Last Supper (detail with Judas, Peter and John), c. 1495-98, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

Lecture in the Cave of Pythagoras, Greece.

Aims

While this MA year of course enables further advanced study and careers in a wide range of fields, it aims at something more fundamental still: to provide its participants with the depth of knowledge, analytical acuity, and enriched imagination that are the basis for both individual flourishing and the renewal of our culture at large. Indeed, the intellectual effort that this demanding program of study entails—extensive reading, intense discussion, and deep thinking—will necessarily prepare its graduates to meet the great challenges of our time.

Every civilization needs sympathetic interpreters who are capable of prizing the cultural treasures that form its foundations; a world in need of renewal requires a vital and synthetic vision, combining materials from different moments in new and unexpected ways. By fostering friendships with mentors and peers in the present, and with the writers, thinkers, and artists of the past, Ralston’s MA in the Humanities will help recreate the conditions of human flourishing—precisely by incorporating its graduates into the very tradition which they themselves will go on to transmit.

Application

Process

Ralston College's MA in the Humanities welcomes applications from those who hold a Bachelor's degree, have a strong record of academic achievement, possess a desire to reflect deeply on fundamental questions, and are willing to question their assumptions and engage with the thoughts of others in a spirit of intellectual charity and good faith.

The initial application to Ralston College's MA in the Humanities program consists of:

a CV or resume
a copy of the applicant's unofficial transcripts
a personal essay of 500-1000 words in which the applicant describes his or her interest in and aptitude for this demanding graduate program

Applications submitted by Monday, February 17, 2025 will receive full consideration.

Promising applicants will be asked, after the initial review of applications, to provide contact information for two references who can speak to their academic abilities. Finalists will be invited to an interview with College faculty.

Apply now

Course Catalog

Course

Catalog

If you wish to dive more deeply into the details of applying to and studying at Ralston College, we encourage you to explore our Course Catalog. In it you will find much more information, including on the goals of the MA program, as well as admissions, assessment, vocational preparation, expectations for academic integrity and conduct, and more.

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