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The Great Books

The foundation of the Core is the Great Books; each student engages primary texts written by the most influential authors of western tradition.

English

Author Title
Homer "The Iliad"  "The Odyssey"
  "Beowulf"
Vergil "Aeneid"
  "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
Dante Alighieri "The Divine Comedy"
John Milton "Paradise Lost"
Aeschylus "Prometheus Bound," "Agamemnon," "Libation Bearers," "Eumenides"
Sophocles "Oedipus the Tyrant," "Oedipus at Colonus," "Antigone"
Euripides "Bacchae"
Aristophanes "Frogs"
Aristotle "Poetics"
  The Book of Job
  "Everyman" & "The Second Shepherd's Play"
Marlowe "Dr. Faustus"
William Shakespeare "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Merchant of Venice," " The Tempest"
Jane Austen "Mansfield Park"
Herman Melville "Moby Dick"
Fyodor Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"
William Faulkner "Go Down, Moses"

Economics

Author Title
Adam Smith "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (selections)
Pope John Paul II "Centesimus Annus"
Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence
  The United States Constitution

History

Author Title
  The Book of Job
Thucydides "History of the Peloponnesian War"
Livy "The Early History of Rome"
Boethius "The Consolation of Philosophy"
Einhard "Life of Charlemagne"
Thomas More "Utopia"
John Calvin "Institutes of the Christian Religion"
Diderot "The 'Philosophe'"  from  "Encyclopdie"
Immanuel Kant "What is Enlightenment?"
Edmund Burke "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Marx and Engels "The Communist Manifesto"
Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum"
Eli Wiesel "Night"
Thomas Jefferson "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," The Declaration of Independence
  The United States Constitution
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, & James Madison "The Federalist Papers"
Frederick Douglass "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave"
Elizabeth Cady Stanton The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Benjamin Franklin "Autobiography"
Henry Adams "The Education of Henry Adams"
Abraham Lincoln Selected Speeches
Frederick Jackson Turner "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
George F. Kennan "American Diplomacy"
Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Philosophy

Author Title
Plato "Republic," and "Phaedo" or "Symposium"
Aristotle "Nichomachean Ethics" (selections), "On the Soul" (selections), "Categories" (selections), "Physics" (selections), "Metaphysics" (selections)
St. Augustine "Confessions" (selections)
St. Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologiae" I-II, q. 94 a. 2, (natural law) or I-II, qq. 1-5 (man's end), "De ente et essentia," "Super Boetii De Trinitate," q. 5, a. 1
René Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy"
Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason" (selections) or "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics"
Friedrich Nietzsche "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life," "Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense"
Martin Heidegger "The Question Concerning Technology" or "What is Metaphysics?" or "The Age of the World-Picture" or "Identity and Difference"
A contemporary Christian personalist, such as Robert Spaemann, Jacques Maritain, Karol Wojtyla, or Norris Clarke, SJ.  

Politics

Author Title
Alexis de Tocqueville "Democracy in America"
Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence
  The United States Constitution
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison "The Federalist Papers"
Frederick Nietzsche "Genealogy of Morals," "The Use and Abuse of History for Life"

Theology

Author Title
  The Bible: Selections from the Old and New Testaments
  Didache
Augustine "Confessions"
St. Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologiae" (selections)
Martin Luther "Heidelberg Disputation," "The Freedom of a Christian"
Melanchthon "The Augsburg Confession"
John Calvin "Institutes of the Christian Religion"
  The Westminster Confession of Faith
  Council of Trent (selections)
  Vatican I (selections)
  Vatican II: "Lumen Gentium"
St. Clement Letter to the Corinthians
St. Ignatius Letters to the Ephesians, Letters to the Romans
St. Athanasius "On the Incarnation"
St. Irenaeus "Against Heresies"

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