John Goodhew | Latin

First Year at ACA: 2024

Ishmael's prayer, "God keep me from ever completing anything!" inspires both John Goodhew's teaching philosophy and his intellectual life. With Thoreau, John believes that it is in part the difficulty and distance of ancient languages that make them worth studying. Alongside Glaucon, John knows firsthand that, "οὗτοι οἱ λόγοι χαλεποί / These words are hard stuff!" (Plato, The Republic). Alongside T.S. Eliot, John nevertheless believes that literature can be the key to salvation: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (The Waste Land). It is this potential for such poetic fragments to affect real life that inspires John to teach.

John graduated with degrees in Classics and Liberal Arts from Seattle Pacific University and later with an M.A. in humanities from Ralston College. In between, he spent several years as a missionary, first in New York City and finally in Scotland. As addenda to working out his salvation in fear and trembling, John enjoys coffee shops with friends, the mountains, and watching rugby while reminiscing about his (largely imaginary) athletic achievements. 

"It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. .. for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? ... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old." (Thoreau, Walden).