Written by Doug Goodnough
Josh Herring, ’11, was a teacher and an administrator at both the middle/high school and college levels for the first 14 years of his professional career. Although he is still doing some teaching, he can now add director and author to his vitae.
As someone who learned about the Great Books as a student at Hillsdale College, he is now championing classical education at the newly founded Logres Institute for Classical Liberal Studies. Herring recently returned to campus to speak to students about his new book, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender.
While finishing his doctorate in philosophy from Faulkner University in 2023, Herring’s dissertation was on C.S. Lewis and his theory of gender. After reading a series of books, including Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman?, he decided to write a book, which was released by the Davenant Institute in March 2026.
“One of the things that was missing was any kind of positive articulation of the goodness of being male or the goodness of being female,” said Herring, who has a master of divinity degree from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We can write to all the objective, fact-based descriptions of how horrifically terrible transgender surgery is. I just don’t think that’s nearly as effective as the slower route of a positive vision you need to appreciate how good it is that God made you this and not that.”
He said he thought his book was originally about Lewis’s view on gender but realized it was much more than that.
“It turns out, gender is itself an example of Lewis’s larger argument,” Herring said. “His larger argument is that all of reality is given to us, and that our task with a gift is to receive it and to unfold the complexity of the gift, to appreciate it, to enjoy it in accordance with its nature, and so then his example of that becomes masculinity and femininity. This is actually Lewis’s theory of everything instead of just gender.”
The son of a pastor, Herring discerned whether to follow in his father’s footsteps before deciding teaching—not preaching—was the path he was supposed to follow.
He was a teacher and later dean of classical education at North Carolina’s Thales Academy for more than 11 years, then served as a professor of classical education and humanities at Thales College for three years. Herring currently serves as the curriculum program manager at the Rafiki Foundation, which works to create classical Christian curricular materials for 11 schools, including 10 in Africa and one in the U.S.
His work in starting the Logres Institute is an attempt to help train classical school teachers. He admires the work Hillsdale College is currently doing in K-12 classical education.
“If classical education is going to grow at a scale that could actually move the cultural needle nationwide, we need thousands of those teachers, and we really need them now,” said Herring, who hopes to begin courses at Logres in October 2026. “My hope is that we can use the tools of modern technology to bring teachers together and help them become more human through the three arts of reading, contemplating, and discussing.”
Homeschooled by his parents in Chesapeake, Virginia, until the ninth grade, Herring said his history teacher at Stonebridge School, Nick Higgins, helped him find Hillsdale. And once he made his campus visit, he was sold.
“The Admissions Office said, ‘Welcome. Here’s a tour guide, and you can sit in on Dr. Kalthoff’s class,’” said Herring, who also received a Hillsdale Tradition Award. “I was enamored with the fact that there were a bunch of people who all wanted to know what justice in ancient Rome was. That’s super cool.”
Once on campus, Herring said he immersed himself in the Great Books and majored in history. However, he said a one-credit forensics class “changed his life.”
“I could travel to all kinds of college campuses for tournaments and actually get really good at public speaking,” he said. “It was like an immediate group to get into with lots to do together, and there were scholarship dollars attached. I did that for four years and it was incredible.”
A member of Mu Alpha and choir, he said meeting his future wife of nearly 15 years, Jennifer Maggi, ’11, was obviously the highlight of his time at Hillsdale. After graduation, Jennifer also taught Latin at Thales Academy for a few years and is currently coaching middle school volleyball in North Carolina.
Herring said after his recent campus visit, Hillsdale “still feels like home.”
“It’s been fascinating to be around here for a couple of days,” he said. “[Students are] getting the same things I got 15 years ago. The biggest thing Hillsdale means to me, though, is the fact that there is a place dedicated to studying things for their own sake. Everywhere else I have been in the last 15 years has made some level of compromise with that idea. To my knowledge, Hillsdale does not compromise at all on that. During freshman orientation, Dr. David Whalen told us, ‘You are not here for job training. You are literally paying us to mess with your minds. You’re here for us to transform you. It’s all about you becoming the person that you are to become.’
“Hillsdale is a community,” Herring continued. “Hillsdale is a pressure cooker in the best sense, but really, Hillsdale is a place for me that values study for its own sake.”
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in September 2026
