Our Work
Lifelong Lyceum provides online tutorials, seminars, and workshops to train students from middle school through adulthood. Courses include liberal arts tutorials for homeschool students; family mentoring workshops for husbands and wives, fathers and mothers; and, professional development courses for high schoolers (e.g., résumé writing and computer skills) through adults (project management, continuing education credits, etc.).
Our Name
“Lyceum” was the name of Aristotle’s school, just as Plato’s school was called the “Academy.” In American usage, a “lyceum” offers public education of the best sort: a series of lectures open to the public to foster education across the community. While we rightly value local communities where face-to-face conversations flourish, we also recognize the value of leveraging technology to build a bridge that connects people who otherwise would be isolated from one another. By emphasizing live videoconferences among small audiences, Lifelong Lyceum fosters an instructional venue that is deeply inter-personal. This lyceum is “lifelong” in its course offerings, which range from middle school through adulthood, and mentor parents from their first pregnancy through raising teens and beyond.
Our Founders
Ryan and Marie MacPherson, who established Into Your Hands LLC in 2012, expanded their family business to operate Lifelong Lyceum in 2026. As Lutheran homeschool parents, they long have lent a helping hand to other homeschool families. After years of observing persistent needs in the homeschool community, they decided to launch a platform by which they and others could offer online tutorials, enrichment classes, and the like, serving not only the children of homeschool families but also adults throughout the life course.
Dr. Ryan MacPherson holds a PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame. After serving for twenty years as a professor at Bethany Lutheran College, he was appointed academic dean of Luther Classical College in 2023. He is author of Rediscovering the American Republic, a two-volume anthology of primary sources in American history, as well as several other books on topics ranging from theology to politics to bioethics. Dr. MacPherson has testified in court in defense of a homeschool father and for the protection of traditional American civics curricula, contributed to legal briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of marriage and the rule of law, appeared regularly on a variety of radio shows, and taught seminars for pastors and educators in Canada, Denmark, and Ecuador.
Mrs. Marie MacPherson is completing (summer 2026) an MA in the great books at Memoria College. She has a BA in elementary education with a certification as a Lutheran teacher in the Evangelical Lutheran Synod as well as a classical Lutheran education certificate from the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education. As a homeschool mother with nearly two decades of experience, she has coordinated music camps, art enrichment courses, and speech teams. She is author of several books, including Teaching Your Children Chastity and a two-volume devotional entitled Meditations on the Vocation of Motherhood. Homeschool moms across America have come to Marie for advice, which finally led her to suggest to her husband that they expand their service to their neighbors by establishing Lifelong Lyceum.
Our Theological Convictions
Everyone has theological convictions. We seek to be transparent about ours so that our students may know what to expect in our courses. We select instructors who uphold these convictions. We expect that our students desire to learn from someone who is coming from this perspective.
- We profess those historic Christian creeds and confessions that have served the church well in offering a public testimony of what Holy Scripture teaches, most notably including:
- The Three Ecumencial Creeds: Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian
- Luther’s Small and Large Catechism
- The Augusburg Confession
- The Magdeburg Confession
- Applied to twenty-first century issues, we affirm:
- that Holy Scripture is the inspired, infallible, inerrant, and efficacious Word of God and that its central proclamation is that Jesus of Nazareth, true God and yet true man, is the Savior of the world in whose name we have the forgiveness of sins, newness of life, and eternal salvation
- that God created everything out of nothing by the power of His almighty Word within six days about 6,000 years ago
- that God created mankind male and female in His image, each gender bearing distinct and complementary traits that deserve respect and protection
- that marriage as instituted by God in Eden remains the proper definition of marriage for all time
- that each person’s life is precious in God’s sight and deserves protection from harm from the moment of fertilization until the moment of natural death
- that our own humanity, bearing the image of God, properly leads us to steward creation humanely for the glory of God and the use and enjoyment of present and future generations
- that civil governments have the divinely instituted purposes of protecting the innocent and punishing the evil-doer, especially with regard to the correlated set of natural responsibilities and natural rights for life, liberty, and property
- Correspondingly, we reject:
- any notion that the Bible is merely a collection of human writings, that it is unreliable, untrue, or irrelevant, or that Jesus was merely a man or merely an ethical guide, or that we don’t have any sins that need forgiveness
- any claim that a long or evolutionary process, rather than “God spoke and it was so,” led to our origin ◦ any denial that there are two genders, male and female, or any denial that both man and woman bear God’s image equally, or any denial that the differences between male and female are well-designed and should be cherished
- any notion that marriage itself (as distinct from customs surrounding marriage) has a fluid definition depending upon one’s culture or personal preferences
- any advocacy for abortion, infanticide, racism, euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide
- any notion that animals have rights, or that animals are moral agents akin to humans, as well as any notion that humans (as distinct from human sin) are a cancer on the globe, that nature in its pristine condition would not be inhabited by humans, or that humans have no divine mandate to exercise dominion over creation
- any notion that civil government is unnecessary or an evil of itself, as well as any notion that government should favor persons who do not fulfill their responsibilities to protect life, liberty, or property, or that government may deny such rights from others without due process of law