Stephen Blackwood Delivers Drummond Lecture in Christ Chapel
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Stephen Blackwood, founding president of Ralston College, presented the third Drummond Lecture of the 2022-2023 academic year in Hillsdale College’s Christ Chapel on March 30. His lecture was titled “‘What a Piece of Work is a Man’: Radical Thoughts on Human Nature.”
During his speech, Blackwood discussed the importance of going back to the fundamentals of human nature to understand the good life. “We have evolved…as self-conscious creatures; creatures for whom their own self-understanding and longing for self-understanding is a non-negotiable fact of nature,” Blackwood said. Blackwood urged that “it’s absolutely essential that you begin by listening to the voices that call you out to those higher things… [and] not to subordinate your life along the way to anything other than that.” He suggested the search for self-discovery and self-knowledge is “an awakening of the self in the world through which what was in you, and you might say forgotten or not yet known, becomes explicit and remembered.”
Blackwood previously held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the “Ralston College Podcast.” Ralston College is in Savannah, Georgia and offers a one-year, intensive Master of Arts in Humanities. Blackwood has been published in the Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and elsewhere, and he is the author of “The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy.”
The Drummond Lecture Series in Christ Chapel presents faculty, staff, and students with lectures on faith, learning, and related issues of the day. Previous speakers include former vice president of the United States Mike Pence, former secretary of education Betsy DeVos, psychiatrist and founder of OptimalWork Kevin Majeres, C.S. Lewis scholar Michael Ward, and Woodson Center President Robert Woodson.
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