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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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 significant novel. Other writers took up the mantel, particularly the astute storyteller Ivan Turgenev who penned Fathers and Sons, arguably the best story of inter-generational conflict, contrasting the patriots of the Napoleonic Era with their indulged sons steeped in nihilistic Romanticism. As we read and connect these two works, we will walk with Pushkin and Turgenev through the languid meadows of Russia's countryside as well as the glittering streets of St. Petersburg, seeking a literary understanding of the nineteenth-century "Russian soul.”