Fall 2025 Course Descriptions

Wayfarers All: Exile, Pilgrimage, and Hope in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages (GTX 3320)
Dr. Melinda Nielsen – TR 2:00 – 3:15

We are wayfarers: in this life we find ourselves midway wandering “in a dark wood,” as Dante famously begins the Commedia. Medieval writers called man a homo viator: one journeys in hope, longing for divine happiness and yet alienated from it. In this course we will explore their visions of order and stability; exile and estrangement; and the quest to regain a joy greater than what was lost. Readings include The Consolation of Philosophy, The Rule of Saint Benedict, Spiritual Friendship, selections from Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, the Gawain poet, and the Canterbury Tales.

Great Texts in the Origins of Science (GTX 3343)
Dr. Eric Martin - MW 4:00 - 5:15

If humans have always sought to understand the world, what is distinctive about the methods, philosophies, or institutions that developed from antiquity to the Early Modern period that we recognize today as “science”? What characterizes scientific inquiry, and does science have the ultimate authority to pronounce on matters of reality? How were religious world views entwined in the beginnings of scientific thought, and has science now superseded religious understanding? This course will investigate such questions through engagement with primary texts in the origins of science, including selections from Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. The class will help students navigate difficult questions about science’s multifaceted history, its place in society, and its philosophical significance.

Wealth, Success, and the Imagination
Great Texts in Business (GTX 3351)
Dr. Michael Stegemoller - MW 1:00 - 2:15 & 2:30 - 3:45

In this course, we will read and discuss some of the great texts that address questions of business and commercial life. These texts may include historical and/or philosophical treatments of business, such as Adam Smith's Of the Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and excerpts from the Old and New Testaments, as well as literary treatments of business, such as Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Dickens's Hard Times,  Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or short stories and essays by Louis Brandeis, Leo Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, William Law, and C.S. Lewis.

Human Language, Memory, and Intelligence
Great Texts on the Principles of the Liberal Arts (GTX 3360)
Dr. Phillip Donnelly - TR 3:30 - 4:45

One source of confusion in contemporary culture is the inability to distinguish between a metaphoric and non-metaphoric use of certain terms, such as “language,” “memory,” and “intelligence” as they are applied to digital technology.  This seminar focuses on ancient and medieval treatments of the verbal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, in order to discern how those pre-digital treatments of those liberal arts speak into present concerns.  The readings will include texts on the verbal arts by Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, and St. Bonaventure, among others. We shall give particular attention to the ways that our present cultural assumptions regarding the character of language, memory, and intelligence shape assumptions regarding the character of the speaking “self,” formerly known as a “person.”

Great Texts in Medicine (GTX 3370)
Dr. Eric Martin - MW 1:00 - 2:15

This course examines classic works in the history of medicine (Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Hildegard von Bingen, and others) as well as important philosophical and literary investigations into the nature of illness and the work of the healing arts (Camus, Woolf, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Lahiri, and others).

From Belief to Uncertainty
Great Texts of the 18th & 19th Centuries (GTX 4320)
Dr. Barry Harvey - MW 2:00 - 3:15

It has been said that in the year 1500 in Western society it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, while in the twenty-first century many find this not only easy, but in some ways inescapable. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed an acceleration of the movement away from tradition that had begun two centuries earlier. Questions about the nature of human existence that once were simply as¬sumed—what is the place of women and men in the given order of things, what are the powers in the social, natural, and supernatural worlds with which we must deal, how should we understand suffering and death, and what constitutes a good and a poor life—and well as the traditional sources for answering those questions, became more and more uncertain as this historical period unfolded. Read from among such noted authors as John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jane Austen, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Christina Rosetti, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Solitude and Contemplation
Great Texts Capstone (GTX 4343)
Dr. Scott Moore - TR 11:00 - 12:15

In this course we will read some of the great texts which have addressed the importance of cultivating solitude and practicing contemplation.  Not to be confused with isolation, exile, or alienation, the cultivation of solitude is an extraordinary practice which slows down the frantic pace of our lives by opening up the riches which come from silence, introspection, and reflection.  We will read ancient authors like Aristotle and Seneca, medieval and renaissance figures such as Petrarch, Montaigne, and Julian of Norwich, and modern authors like Pascal, Thoreau, Merton, Weil, Pieper, Berry, and Dillard.  Come join us to learn how powerful silence can be.