Fall 2020 Master's Courses at Memoria College

406 - Laying Out the Good Life: A Stroll through Aristotle's Ethics (Fall 2020)

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. 

407-Fairy Tales and Children's Literature (Fall 2020)

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.


601 - Introduction to a Liberal Education (Fall 2020)

606 - Imaginative Literature (Fall 2020)

610 - Philosophy (Fall 2020)

405 - Introduction to Russian Literature (Fall 2020)

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.”