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
- Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
- Beowulf
- Virgil: 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, Tempest
- Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
- Herman Melville: Moby Dick
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
- William Faulkner: Go Down, Moses
Economics
- 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
- Herodotus: Histories
- Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
- Livy: The History of Rome (selections)
- Boethius: On the Consolation of Philosophy
- Einhard: Life of Charlemagne
- Thomas More: Utopia
- John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Denis Diderot: Encyclopedie (selections)
- 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, and 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
- Frederick Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals,
The Use and Abuse of History for Life
- Plato: Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus,
Symposium
- Aristotle: Metaphysics, Nichomachean Ethics (selections),
On the Soul (selections), Poetics
- St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae (Treatises on
Happiness & on Law), On Essence and Existence,
Summa Theologiae (selections), On Being & Essence
- René Descartes: Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
What is Enlightenment?
- Heidegger: What is Metaphysics? The Question Concerning Technology
- Parmenides: On Nature
- St. Augustine: Confessions
- Hegel: Phenomenology of the Spirit
Politics
- 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
- 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
