Samuel grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and was the last of his siblings to attend Hillsdale College for undergraduate studies. After college, Samuel took a position at a classical Christian school just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he taught Upper School Rhetoric, English Literature, and Latin, and was the director of the school’s senior thesis program. Samuel is married to his wonderful wife Carly and they reside in Hillsdale, Michigan.
Research interests: Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, Ancient Greece and Rome, Education, Leisure, Amusement, Comedy
Post-graduation plans: Education, Education Administration, Curriculum, Research, Post-Doctoral Research
Extracurricular academic activities: Classical piano
What brought you to Hillsdale? A second orbit of the sun is a once in a lifetime experience. When you have a chance to make a second pass, you don’t just go whistling on by with your face toward the Lucretian void. How could I pass up on the opportunity to make a second pass, and this time, facing the sun?
What has been the thing you’ve appreciated most about your time here? Dr. Erik Ellis. For three hours a week Iam regularly transported to ancient times and distant music.
What has been your greatest academic challenge thus far? Reading. Why read when I can be talking to others? Without an end toward the communication of what I learn to others, I find it difficult to read. (Even though I know that reading is a real conversation with an author in a text!) Without my conviction that the culminating capstone of rhetoric—the delivery of meaning to others—is the final stage of learning, I would never read a text in the first place.
What is distinctive about Hillsdale’s Graduate School of Classical Education? Hillsdale’s Graduate School of Classical Education is the first educational institution of which I have been a part wherein the communal desire to learn—and to love to learn—is not simply an epithet, but in all practicality, a way of life. It radiates in the words we speak, the emotions we share, and the things we contemplate.
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