
Available courses

This course will offer an overview of teaching through the reading of classic texts on how best to teach and learn. It will cover the three modes of teaching, their origins in Aristotle's rhetoric and their modern manifestation in Mortimer Adler's "Three Columns." The student will also learn the best method of approach to the teaching of certain specific subjects such as the basic skills of reading, mathematics, and penmanship; classical languages; the trivium subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; as well as the proper teaching of the humanities and the natural sciences. Participants will also gain a basic knowledge of important modern pedagogical debates, with an emphasis on the debate between traditional education and modern progressivism.

In this short course we will learn some of the practical studying and writing skills that will help you to get the most out of your courses with Memoria College. We will discuss methods of reading, taking notes, and annotating great texts. We will practice strategies for fruitful conversations both in class and in our online discussion forums. Most importantly, however, we will reflect on the kinds of mindset and character that produce a flourishing intellectual life.

In this short course, we will overview what you can expect from the Great Books curriculum established by Mortimer Adler that you will use at Memoria College. We will discuss the ideas of a "Great Tradition" or a "Great Conversation," and critically examine how these approaches to classical material might interact with a purely Christian education. We will also examine Adler's division and selection of texts and his enumeration of "Great Ideas" or themes that we will trace throughout these texts. Finally, we will discuss ways that you may profitably supplement Adler's canon and follow up texts or authors that you find of particular interest.

G. K. Chesterton is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. A major influence on C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity, and on the development of Tolkien's understanding of the imaginative process, Chesterton continues to inspire new generations of readers. In this five-week seminar, Joseph Pearce, author of Wisdom & Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, will lead us through some of Chesterton's most important works, discussing the ideas that animate them.


Dr. Vigen Guroian has served as Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Professor of Theology at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, and has also served on the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Seminary in Baltimore. He is the author of Rallying the Really Human Things, Tending the Heart of Virtue, and Incarnate Love. In this five-week seminar, students will read and discuss five of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories.

- Teacher: Vigen Guroian
Joseph Pearce offers a five-week seminar on some of the greatest and most influential poetry ever written. It will include in-depth line-by-line expositions of two "difficult" poems, one by Hopkins and the other by T. S. Eliot, as well as surveys of some of the most significant Romantic poetry and war poetry. The poets studied will include Hopkins, Eliot, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton, Owen and Sassoon.

- Teacher: Joseph Pearce
What is the point of a poem? And what happens when ideas and images meet with time and place in the mind of a poet? Is this moment of value only to the poet as a private possession? Or are those times and places themselves enhanced by becoming springboards for works of art? In this course we will make a sojourn into Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems completed during World War II and well after his conversion to Christianity, not only to discover how the poems came to be composed but, more largely, to explore the confluence of familiar strains of human experience, from religious faith to history to landscapes to hiking to eating to drinking to music, and see how poetry that arises out of speculation on all of these can heighten our senses of the real and the possible and the eternal. We should all have a little poetry in us, so together we will wrestle—and lounge—with T.S. Eliot, an Olympian of the craft.

- Teacher: Tracy Lee Simmons

- Teacher: Dan Sheffler
Instructor: Dan Sheffler
Term: January 5-May 4
Class Time: Tuesday, 7-9
A study in the classic texts of political philosophy, addressing the questions faced by both ancient people and people today: What are the ends of political life? What is the best form of government to serve these ends? What is the proper relation between government and the individual, and between government and religion? Authors covered include Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, the Old and New Testaments, Tacitus, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, William Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Rousseau, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill.

- Teacher: Dan Sheffler
In the end, all questions are theological. Pagans and Christians, atheists and saints have all shaped every aspect of the Great Conversation by the way they think (or don't think) about God. In this course, we will try to develop an appreciation for the broad sweep of this history beginning with the Greeks, moving to the Christian middle ages, and ending in modernity. This class will not be a course in Christian systematic theology as you might expect to find at a seminary. Instead, we will be reading broadly from literature, drama, philosophy, epic, and scripture in order to learn how mankind has thought about God, eternity, the soul, ultimate meaning, and worship.
Instructors: Dr. Dan Sheffler Rev. David Charlton, Thomas Cothran, Jerry Salyer
Term: January 5-May 4
Class Time: Wednesday, 7-9

- Teacher: David Charlton
- Teacher: Thomas Cothran
- Teacher: Jerry Salyer
- Teacher: Dan Sheffler
Instructor: Professor Carol Reynolds
Term: January 5-May 4
Class Time: Monday, 7-9
Using masterworks of Romantic/Early Modern literature, we will explore together two archetypal themes: the conflict between Good and Evil; and man’s struggle to find meaning. Goethe’s rollicking , earth-shattering play Faust, Part I (1808) will set the frame for us. Then, we will proceed through Gogol’s ironic (and prophetic) short story The Nose (1836), Dostoevsky’s probing novel The Brother’s Karamazov (1880), Tolstoy’s incomparable novel Anna Karenina (1878), and conclude with Chekhov’s searing play The Cherry Orchard (1903).

- Teacher: Carol Reynolds
Instructor: Tracy Lee Simmons (author of Climbing Parnassus)
Term: 5 Week Course
Dates: October 8 – November 5
Time: Thursdays 7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. EDT.
Why should we read Aristotle's Ethics? Because the work is evergreen. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1983 shook ethicists out of their complacent slumbers by confronting them anew with the ethical thought of Aristotle. The duty-based ethics of Immanuel Kant and the consequentialist ethics of John Stuart Mill had led many thinkers, however unwittingly, back to Aristotle, whose seminal achievements had fallen as a casualty of the European Enlightenment. And recent decades have seen an even more profound reappreciation of Aristotle as expressions like "human flourishing" have made their way back into discussions of what it means to be good and happy in this world. Tracy Lee Simmons, former associate editor at National Review during the editorship of William F. Buckley and author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, will serve as your practical guide through this great work on the Good Life.

- Teacher: Tracy Lee Simmons
Instructor: Vigen Guroian (author of Tending the Heart of Virtue)
Term: 5 Weeks
Dates: Nov. 12-Dec. 19
Time: Thursday, 6:30-8:30
A seminar on religion and children’s literature Dr. Guroian first gave at Loyola University in Maryland and later at the University of Virginia. The goal will be to learn the moral and religious meaning in the stories Dr. Guroian has selected for the seminar and to discover in the stories themselves what makes them good stories. Dr. Guroian has chosen two stories of novel length, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. The shorter fairy tales that we will read are from that great corpus of fairy stories that have left for us by the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy Tale readings will include: The Grimms’s Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, The Juniper Tree. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, The Nightingale, The Little Mermaid.

- Teacher: Vigen Guroian

- Teacher: David Charlton
- Teacher: Dan Sheffler

- Teacher: Martin Cothran
- Teacher: Joseph Pearce

- Teacher: Thomas Cothran
- Teacher: Jerry Salyer
Instructor: Dr. Carol Reynolds
Term: 5 Week Course
Time: Thursdays 7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. EDT.
Dates: August 27-September 24
With so much well-deserved attention on Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov) and Tolstoi (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), it could be surmised that these two authors created Russian literature! But before them, a dashing, ill-fated poet named Alexander Pushkin set Russian literature afire, especially with Eugene Onegin, Russia’s most

- Teacher: Eden Cook
- Teacher: Carol Reynolds