KEYNOTES:

Gratitude and the Modern Condition
Matthew B. Crawford

The technological attitude is one that seeks to subject everything to rational control. This makes it difficult to experience gratitude, which is a posture toward the world in which one receives what is given, rather than trying to remake the world according to the will. Such reception is often accompanied by wonder, the theme of our conference. I will parse this tension between gratitude and technology as it manifests in various areas of culture, and consider its significance for the challenge of living fully.

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Shakespeare and the Classics
Sir Jonathan Bate

Shakespeare is at the centre of the classical tradition. So what made him a classic? This lecture will argue that the answer is to be found in his own classical education. His grammar school education in the Latin language, in rhetoric and the reading of the great texts of classical antiquity shaped his imagination and enabled him to become a great writer and dramatist himself. No fewer than thirteen of his forty works are set in the world of classical antiquity – and all his works rely on techniques he first learned in the grammar school that gave him a classical education. His friend and rival Ben Jonson was quite wrong to say that Shakespeare had “small Latin” – without Latin, there would have been no Shakespeare, and without Shakespeare we would not have a thriving classical education revival today.

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Witness and Wonder
Jessica Hooten-Wilson

In Socrates’s pursuit of justice, he wonders over how to educate the next generation to be those who love what is beautiful. As educators we must witness to something higher than ourselves. We must become like the survivors at the conclusion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 who embody the witness of the great tradition. “Witness begets witness,” writes Carolyn Forche. If we want our students to become those whose lives testify to something beyond their own pleasures; if we hope they are going to become the people who, in the words of Montaigne, know how to die well; we must know how to witness to them what is worth loving that they may become witnesses of the same.

In her 2025 keynote address, Professor Hooten Wilson thoughtfully described for her audience of educators her understanding of how teaching proceeds; when we teach, she explained, we walk beside our students through a text.  To illustrate Hooten Wilson took us with her along the path she treads with her students when teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Like Virgil walking beside Dante, we guide them through the difficult levels of the text as far as our own understanding will take us.

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