Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears! 

I have not one, not two, but three very exciting announcements to make! 

At the start of our Spring Sale, we announced the Old Western Culture Companion Series, and we are thrilled at the reception! It is obvious this fills a need and desire in a great books curriculum, and makes Old Western Culture an even greater and more delightful tool for teaching and reading the great books. And it is beautiful! 

Before I get to the new announcements, a few very quick additional details about the OWC Companion Series, as we’ve received some questions. 

YES, we are publishing all four years, a total of 16 units! We are not selling years 2-4 just yet because the timeline is not set in stone. Our aim is to release four units per year, or faster. Units 1-4 (The Greeks) are available for order today, and they are still on sale! As a result of the delayed release of the following three announcements, we are extending our Spring Sale by a week, as we needed a bit more time before we could announce the following releases, and families are discovering Roman Roads through these new products.

So, back to the announcements: 

First Announcement: Word Hoard: The Rhetoric of Poetry, by Joffre Swait. This new curriculum is a rhetoric course. And it’s a poetry course. But it would be better described as a bootcamp in Wordcraft. In fact, we have added a new category on the Roman Roads Press website, that reflects our recommended Scope and Sequence, and joins together subjects often wrongly studied in isolation one from the other. Instead of Poetry, Logic, and Rhetoric as distinct categories, we now group these under one category: Wordcraft. And this is a great way to explain what Word Hoard is, and where it fits in the curriculum. 

Word Hoard is the capstone of a classical education. While any high school student and above can jump right into this course – there is no strict prerequisite – the ideal preparation is a foundation in the grammar of poetry, followed by the ability to reason through formal and informal logic, followed by the formal study of Rhetoric, and the modes of persuasion. This is the ideal preparation for Word Hoard, the Rhetoric of Poetry. Let me quote the back cover for a moment: “Word Hoard is a practical guide to nobility through understanding and wielding the English language in its most elevated forms. It is an exercise book on truth, beauty, and goodness as spoken.

This book will help grow your skill and confidence in poetry, your aesthetic sensibility, and your rhetorical performance. As you will soon learn, our words are our greatest treasures, our finest tools, and our most dangerous weapons. As speakers of the good word, the good-spell, the gospel, we will not allow the destroyers and robots to hold the field.

As English speakers, we have an incredible poetic heritage. We come from a people who mightily and manfully valued verbs and verse. The speakers of Old English loved their swordplay and their poems and their poems about swordplay.”

And this a great way to introduce our second announcement: 

Second Announcement: We have a republic to keep!

As we hone our Wordcraft, there is a forgotten realm that desperately needs remembering.  Last year we released The Forgotten Realm, which is a guide to the civil realm and how it works. We are pleased to announce that for the 250th anniversary of the United States, the accompanying Curriculum, The Civil Realm, will be available! The Civil Realm curriculum is a one-semester course (or one year with additional readings) that teaches how the civil realm works, and what it means to be a citizen of the United States, with application on how and why every citizen can be involved in the civil realm all around them, especially at a local level. Do you know the name of your mayor, city councilors, county commissioners? Do you know what they do? This curriculum is for every citizen young and old, not just those “interested in politics” (although elected officials have told us they wished they had this book before they ran for office!). We have also collaborated with the Classic Learning Test to ensure that it is also excellent preparation for the CLT Civics Exam releasing this July 4th. I started this announcement by saying, we have a republic to keep. You may know the famous reply of Benjamin Franklin when asked if we had a republic or monarchy: “A republic, if you can keep it”, emphasizing that the new American government required active civic duty and vigilance to survive. For centuries, this was instilled in Americans. But over the last generation, we have forgotten the civil realm. It’s time for American citizens to do more than rage-vote every election cycle. And that starts with understanding how the civil realm works, and how it is all around us. 

Related to the Civil Realm Curriculum is a new Roman Roads Classics: Foundations in Liberty: The Founding Documents that Shaped American Freedom, edited with introductions by Elizabeth Landis, author of the Civil Realm Curriculum, and covering foundational documents that shaped our nation, from the Magna Carta, to the Mayflower Compact, to the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, and of course our Constitution. That is available for pre-order today, and will be released in time for the 250th birthday this July 4th. 

Third announcement:
The Aeneid Reader’s Guide is out! In this Reader’s Guide to the great epic that is the founding myth of Rome, Joe Carlson walks through the poem’s twelve books, offering for each a list of the characters and places, in-depth summaries, and several analyses that explore both what Vergil is doing and its relevance to a modern audience.

Tying it together: A Brief Contemplation on America 250

Permit me to tie these three announcements together in a single theme and cast a vision for American households. This July, America turns 250 years old. 

I do not believe it is possible to fully and completely understand what it means to be American without understanding what it means to be Roman. If you read the American founders, you will find not incidental, but constant references to Roman history and historians and republican ideals. The American founders self-consciously modeled our Republic after the Roman Republic, as it was inherited through Christendom. I recently visited DC, and was amazed at just how visible that mark is even on our architecture. Students of Old Western Culture will recall in The Romans how George Washington modeled himself after the great Roman Cincinnatus. American ideals–concepts of Freedom, of Duty, of honor, of law and order, of Patriotism–are uniquely Roman. I grew up in France, which allowed me the perspective of realizing these are uniquely American values–and they are good. And the most important work of all Roman history is Vergil’s Aeneid, the founding myth of Rome, which shaped Rome’s ideas and thoughts. So much so that we see echoes of it throughout the New Testament, as the Roman-Paul preached to Roman citizens, and explained the Gospel in Roman terms. 

But it is not enough to reminisce and love America, though that is important. It is not enough to study her history, and understand her beginning, though that is important. It is not until we understand our roles as citizens and how the civil realm works that we can truly take possession of the incredible inheritance left to us by our American founders. And it is a fragile thing. A Republic, IF we can keep it, said Franklin. 

And training the next (and current) generation is the objective of The Civil Realm Curriculum. The Civil Realm Curriculum is a practical guide, not merely theory. Students fill out their “Civic address” and walk away not only knowing what a county commissioner does (for example), but what their name is, and in many cases (we hope most), a county commissioner will know your student’s name as well. City councils across the nation will not understand where all these young people came from. Families and churches will be able to pray for their rulers by name. Not abstractly.  And it will be a great blessing to this nation. 

But with that task comes the need for wielding words wisely, effectively, and powerfully. And that is why you need an arsenal at your disposal – you need to build your Word Hoard. 

Summary

Understand who we are (We are Roman and American, we are Christian). Understand what we are as a nation and how we work (The Civil realm). 

And then if those things have sunk into our bones, the result must be–ought to be–gratitude. And the entire culmination of a students education, the ultimate visible, audible, tangible, mark-leaving, test of a student’s education will be his or her words. 

This is the part a student takes into the world every day, in the workplace and home, speaking to your children, your boss, your civic leaders, preaching or teaching or encouraging or defending or tearing down or admonishing or loving: you will use words. You will use your Word Hoard.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
We are people of the Word, and therefore we should be people of words.

May God bless your family as you seek to inherit the Humanities. And my prayer is that our curriculum, and these new releases in particular, will be powerful in your hands for the task at hand. 

Central to Roman Roads’s mission of uniting beauty and education is our flagship product Old Western Culture. Our emphasis on making a beautiful product which trains the eye, mind, and heart to behold beauty and cultivate wonder has set Old Western Culture apart from other curricula.

ART
Throughout the course we share and discuss the artistic accomplishments of the different ages of the West, as well as the art connected to the literature being studied. More on this in our forthcoming announcement of The Old Western Culture Companion!

SETTING
Instead of filming the lectures in front of a whiteboard or podium, our primary lecturer, Wes Callihan, sits in his own library, among the classics he’s discussing, letting the works of the ages set the stage for the poetry, history, and stories he shares. Our other authors have the studio adapted to their most natural setting. For Mitch Stokes, that was a traditional chalkboard. For Peter Leithart, it was the podium. For Joe Carlson, a desk.

INTEGRATED USE
This curriculum is intended for more than just students: we want to see these works enriching the lives of whole families and future generations of Western Christians. That’s why we started the Great Books Reading Challenge for Parents. The parents of our students read the texts and watch the lessons of a particular portion of OWC which we offer for free during the challenge. Furthermore, Old Western Culture is used by teachers for teacher training, and adult learners of every age. Like Lewis’ comments about children’s literature, if a curriculum is loved and inspiring to students, it should be to university professors and teaches and entire families as well.

If you desire to inherit these great books of Western civilization in your home, Old Western Culture is a beautiful tool for the job.

Blessings, Daniel Foucachon
CEO, Roman Roads Press