Wenham Residency Information

Colonial-era Massachusetts offers its own set of Christian responses to the classical tradition – if in Protestant and Enlightenment keys. 
 
The overall schedule of the two weeks and the rhythms of the day will be identical to those in Orvieto, but the references and illustrations and case studies will be drawn, whenever possible, from New England history instead of the history of central Italy. The two-day-long excursions will take us to Boston, and to a series of nearby towns and school campuses easily reached from Gordon College.
 
The course on a Liberal Arts approach to Leadership can draw on a panoply of remarkable leaders in education, church, and political society from Colonial New England. The course on Campus Design can draw on a rich set of exemplary models of purposeful design of towns, churches, town halls and school campuses, and in the high artisanship of furniture and utensils.

After all, the designers of an independent United States often looked to the great Roman Republican statesmen, such as Cicero and Cato, as inspirational touchstones for their own resistance to the imperial English monarchy. 

The classical Liberal Arts remained the cornerstone of the education transported to the Colonies. The great oratory exemplified in gifted preachers such as Cotton Mather, in the inspirational speeches of patriots like Patrick Henry and Alexander Hamilton, is the product of education in Rhetoric. And as evidence of their training in the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium as well as the Trivium arts of language and thought, remember that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, as well as six of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (and Lewis & Clark, of course) were all surveyors by trade. As a teen-aged slave, Frederick Douglass drew an entire education from a single anthology of great speeches from Demosthenes to William Pitt. (The Colombian Orator was first published in 1797 with 23 editions to follow, shaping the American mind for three generations.) 

Our contemporary recovery of classical-Christian education represents a revitalization of the tradition that informed the schools and colleges established in the first century of settlement in New England, such as the Boston Latin School and the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and of course Harvard, Yale, and Princeton colleges.