The late-Renaissance witnessed the emergence of a genre of music known today as “opera.” The crown jewel of the Western Classical tradition, opera transformed itself many times. One manifestation called Singspiel, opéra comique, or dialogue opera sprang from Enlightenment ideals and featured a structure reliant on spoken dialogue, examples of which include Mozart’s Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Bizet’s Carmen, and, in the 20th century, a spectacular repertoire called “the Broadway Musical.” This seminar will examine the literary, musical, and cultural roots of that repertoire and highlight works considered landmarks, including Showboat (1927), Oklahoma (1943), West Side Story (1957), and Sunday in the Park with George [Seurat] (1984).
- Teacher: Carol Reynolds
This seminar offers an intensive exploration of the theological and philosophical dimensions of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, with a focus on her distinctive religious imagination. A committed Catholic writing in the Protestant American South, O’Connor crafted stories that confront readers with unsettling visions of grace, judgment, and redemption—often mediated through grotesque characters and violent epiphanies.
Students will examine five of O’Connor’s most theologically rich short stories: “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Revelation,” “The Artificial Ni**er,” and “Parker’s Back.” Seminar discussions will focus on O’Connor’s use of irony and symbol, her engagement with classical and Christian thought, and the role of suffering and the grotesque in her vision of divine grace. Students will be encouraged to articulate their own interpretations through weekly reflections and a final research paper that integrates theological insight with literary analysis.
This course is ideal for students seeking to deepen their understanding of the interplay between literature and theology, especially within the Western Christian tradition.
- Teacher: Vigen Guroian
This five-week summer seminar course will offer an overview of teaching through the reading of classic texts on how best to teach and learn. Participants will be guided through a selection of readings covering the three modes of teaching, their origins in Aristotle's rhetoric and their modern manifestation in Mortimer Adler's "Three Columns," which includes didactic teaching (lecture), coaching, and Socratic teaching. 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 gain a basic knowledge of important pedagogical debates such as the content/process debate, the phonics/whole language debate, the competing strategies of reading instruction, and issues in the debate between traditional education and progressivism. Certain popular contemporary pedagogies will be critically analyzed as well as certain approaches to subjects such as "whole word" reading strategies and versions of the "new math" in mathematics instruction.
- Teacher: Martin Cothran
We learn how to teach when stories teach us how to learn. Through earnest discussion of the form and content of select short fiction and poetry, this course will uncover how authors speak by means of imagery, what meaning lies in analogy, and why the exercise of imagination forms a necessary part of a liberal education, with the goal of sharpening our sense of purpose when we read.
Reading List:
- Teacher: Kyle Janke
What does it mean for a man to be free? How does a man use his freedom well? These questions address the heart of the classical distinction between the liberal arts (Latin liber = free) and the servile or mechanical arts. A “liberal” education refers to the steps that lead away (e-ducere = to lead out) from the default, easy, servile starting point of our unrefined nature (erudition = being shaped and refined, i.e. not being rudus or “unformed”) to the full life befitting a free man. In this course, we will explore the tradition of liberal learning from Plato to Karl Marx, examining these questions from all sides. We will ask what it means to be truly educated, what education is for, and what kind of freedom is desirable for man. Hopefully, this will lay a foundation for your other courses at Memoria College as you establish a basic understanding of what all these classes are about.
We will read: Plato, Apology, Crito, Republic I–II; Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics I, Politics I; Plutarch, Lives “Lycurgus and Numa Compared,” “Alexander,” “Caesar”; Job; Augustine Confessions I–VIII; Montaigne Essays (selections); Shakespeare, Hamlet; Locke, Second Essay on Government; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 15–16; Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Federalist Papers (selections); Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Part.
- Teacher: Dan Sheffler
This course offers 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? To answer these questions we will need to go beyond the surface-level policy discussions that we hear on the news and examine instead the fundamental issues that these policy discussions rest upon. By taking in a broad range of great books, we will also gain some understanding of the long historical development of Western political ideas.
We will read: Plato Republic I–V; Aristotle Politics I, III–IV; I Samuel; Tacitus Annals I, XIII–XVI; Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II QQ. 90–97; Machiavelli, Prince; Hobbes, Leviathan Introduction, 13–21; Shakespeare, Henry IV; Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws Preface, I–VIII; Rousseau, The Social Contract I–II; Locke, Second Essay on Government; Kant, The Science of Right Introduction, Second Part; Federalist (selections); Hegel, Philosophy of Right Introduction, III.III; Mill, Representative Government I–VIII, On Liberty;
- Teacher: Jan Bentz
The ancient epic tradition of Homer stands at the beginning of all Western literature. Many centuries later, Virgil self-consciously imitates this beginning in order to do for the Romans what Homer did for the Greeks. These poems tell the tale of larger-than-life heroes on the plain of battle, of gods aiding and foiling the plans of men, of glorious victory and pitiful loss—all in lofty lines of dactylic hexameter. In this course, we will study both the cultural milieu in which these epics were composed and the later culture that they helped to found.
We will read: Odyssey I–V, Odyssey VI–X, Odyssey XI–XIV, Odyssey XV–XX, Odyssey XXI–XXIV, Iliad I–V, Iliad VI–X, Iliad XI–XIV, Iliad XV–XX, Iliad XXI–XXIV, Aeneid I–II, Aeneid III–IV, Aeneid V–VII, Aeneid VIII–X, and Aeneid XI–XII.
- Teacher: Dr. Frank Russell
“[T]here is not a place of splendor or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve if only a passing glance of wonder or pity,” says Joseph Conrad in his famous “Preface,” where he discusses the purpose of art and particularly of literary fiction. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the world lost (for good or ill) its sense of philosophical and theological grounding and consensus, we see a flowering of realistic fiction that seeks to portray both the splendid and the dark, to arouse wonder and pity, and to investigate questions of human meaning and purpose from a uniquely literary angle. In this course, we will study some of the great works of that period and will investigate these authors’ investigations of the human being. But we will also consider these authors’ reflections on their own art, asking with Conrad, “What is literature for? What is it meant to do for and to us?”
We will read: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, “Preface to the N—- of the Narcissus” and Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen.
- Teacher: Lesley-Anne Williams
Born and bred at Oxford, a tutorial is a one-on-one intensive study where a knowledgeable tutor works directly with a student on their unique work. That work could be an essay on a particular theme, a problem set in mathematics, a legal argument, a creative work (poem, short story), or the like. The primary source material for discussion in a tutorial is the student’s work, although other readings will be assigned to structure and guide the student