The Role
Filmmaker in Residence.
Micheal Flaherty was appointed Filmmaker in Residence at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford by Dr. Michael Lloyd and Dr. Jonathan Brant. The appointment created a new category of practitioner-scholar at one of Oxford's oldest halls — a filmmaker who teaches not technique, but theology of narrative: why stories work, what they form in us, and how the classical transcendentals provide a framework for making work that lasts.
The two-day seminars — open to students and the wider public — bring working filmmakers, theologians, and cultural critics into conversation about what a genuinely new Renaissance in storytelling might look like. The curriculum lives online at thinkagain.studio/wycliffe.
"Grateful to Dr. Michael Lloyd and Dr. Jonathan Brant for generously giving me the opportunity of a lifetime as Filmmaker in Residence at Wycliffe."
— Micheal Flaherty, LinkedIn
- Appointed by Dr. Michael Lloyd and Dr. Jonathan Brant
- Two-day intensive seminars, Oxford campus
- Digital curriculum: thinkagain.studio/wycliffe
- Open to students and the wider public
The Framework
The classical transcendentals.
The New Renaissance Project organizes its curriculum around the three classical transcendentals — the properties that medieval philosophers held to be universally true of all being, and that the greatest storytellers in history have always understood to be inseparable.
Stories that tell the truth about what it is to be human — including the parts that are hard and broken and unresolved. No Pollyanna endings. No easy grace.
Stories that form virtue — not by preaching it, but by showing what it looks like lived out in circumstances that make it cost something.
Stories made with craft, care, and aesthetic ambition — because beauty is not decoration. It is the thing itself. It is what makes truth and goodness bearable to look at.
The Curriculum
Three phases. One argument.
The First Story
Where does the impulse to tell stories come from? Why do human beings — across every culture in every era — reach for narrative as the primary way of making sense of experience? The curriculum begins here, in the theology of story itself, before it addresses a single frame or screenplay structure.
The Shape of Stories
The classical structures — not as formulas but as accumulated wisdom about how narrative works on human psychology. From Aristotle's Poetics to the hero's journey to the specific demands of documentary and long-form audio journalism. How stories are built and why the building matters.
The Quick Win
The practical: how to identify a story worth telling, how to get it funded and made and seen, how to build the audience relationships that sustain a career across decades. The accumulated lessons of thirty years in production, distribution, and grassroots marketing.