Honors Reading List

 

Honors Reading List

Rhetorical Eloquence

  • Aristotle, On rhetoric
  • Plato, Phaedrus
  • Cicero, On the Orator
  • Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
  • Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric

Writing about Literature

  • No thread texts

Polis and Covenant

  • The Old Testament
  • Homer
  • Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
  • Plato, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic
  • Aristotle, The Politics (or) the Ethics
  • Aeschylus, The Oresteia (or) Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone
  • Epicurus
  • Hinge  – Polybius, The Histories

Caesar and Christ

  • Hinge  – Polybius, The Histories
  • The New Testament
  • Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
  • Cicero, On Duties
  • Virgil, the Aeneid
  • Hinge - Augustine, The Confessions

Christendom and Islam

  • Hinge - Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
  • Beowulf
  • The Koran
  • Aquinas, Summa
  • Dante, Divine Comedy
  • Chaucer, Canturbury Tales
  • Hinge - Petrarch, Letters to Dead Authors, Ascent of Mt. Ventous, Letter to Posterity

Humanism and Reform

  • Hinge - Petrarch, The Secret
  • Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
  • Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man
  • Machiavelli, The Prince
  • More, Utopia
  • Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, In Praise of Folly
  • Luther, On Christian Freedom
  • Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
  • Shakespeare
  • Hinge – Milton, Paradise Lost

Reason and Revolt

  • Hinge – Milton, Areopagitica, On Education
  • Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
  • Bacon, Novum Organum
  • Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations
  • Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
  • Pope, Essay on Man
  • Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings
  • Johnson, Rasselas
  • Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Austen
  • Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Hinge – Goethe, The Sorrows of young Werther

Despair and Hope

  • Hinge – Goethe, Faust
  • Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto
  • Hegel, On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy
  • Darwin, Origin of Species
  • Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
  • Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
  • Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner
  • Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
  • Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  • Huxley, Brave New World
  • Plantiga

Roots of American Order

  • Locke, Second Treatise
  • Smith, Wealth of Nations
  • Declaration of Independence
  • Constitution
  • Federalist Papers
  • Calhoun
  • Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, First Inaugural
  • Frederick Douglass, Autobiography

Christian Vocation and Worldview

  • Newman, The Idea of a University
  • Niebuhr, Christ and Culture
  • Guinness, The Call
  • Postman, Technopoly
  • Lewis, The Abolition of Man