The Core Curriculum: The Humanities

Sattler College’s core curriculum in the humanities consists of four components:

1. An intensive introduction to expository writing, rhetoric, and the tradition of liberal arts education
2. A three-semester sequence of lectures and discussion-based seminars devoted to the key philosophical, literary, and artistic works of the western intellectual tradition, from Antiquity to the modern era
3. A three-semester sequence of seminars on the Old and New Testaments, the foundational texts of Christian theology, and apologetics
4. A survey of Global Christianity, equipping students with understanding of the history and life of the Church in non-western societies  

Students will grapple with the core texts that generation upon generation has returned to read – in times of war and peace, in times of plague and plenty – in order to gain special insights into our human struggles and to reclaim our highest ideals:

• The Bible
• Homer, Iliad
• Homer, Odyssey
• Aeschylus, The Oresteia
• Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus
• Herodotus, Histories
• Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
• A Presocratics Reader
• Plato, Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, The Republic
• Aristotle, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics
• Cicero, On Duties, On the Orator
• Livy, The History of Rome
• Virgil, The Aeneid, Eclogues
• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Tacitus, The Annals
• Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, On the Shortness of Life, On Mercy, On Liberal and Vocational Studies
• Plutarch, Parallel Lives, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, On Listening, On Contentment, On Exile
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• The Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
• Augustine, Confessions, City of God, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
• Cassiodorus, Introduction to Divine and Humane Letters
• The Song of Roland
• Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon
• Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs
• Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias
• Aquinas, Summa Theologica

• Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind into God
• Dante, The Divine Comedy
• Petrarch, The Ascent of Mont Ventoux
• Boccaccio, The Decameron
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Three Virtues
• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
• Vergerio, The Character and Studies
• Befitting a Free-Born Youth
• Valla, Dialogue on Free Will
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• More, Utopia
• Erasmus, Enchiridion, Colloquies, Paraclesis, The Complaint of Peace
• Luther, Two Kinds of Righteousness, The Freedom of a Christian, Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians
• Sattler, The Schleitheim Confession
• Melanchthon, The Augsburg Confession
• Calvin, The Institutes
• Ursinus, The Heidelberg Catechism
• Loyola, Spiritual Exercises
• Teresa of Avila, Autobiography
• de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians
• Montaigne, Essays
• Foxe, Book of Martyrs
• Shakespeare, Richard II, King Lear
• de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
• Donne, Poems
• Bacon, The New Organon
• Descartes, Discourse on Method
• Blaise Pascal, Pensées
• Hobbes, Leviathan

• van Braght, Martyrs’ Mirror
• van Schurman, Eukleria
• Milton, Paradise Lost
• Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Locke, Second Treatise on Government
• Voltaire, Candide
• Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, The Social Contract, Emile
• Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
• Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, On Perpetual Peace, What is Enlightenment?
• Franklin, Autobiography
• Hamilton, Madison & Jay, The Federalist Papers
• Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
• Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 
• Tocqueville, Democracy in America
• Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
• Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
• Mill, On Liberty; Utilitarianism
• Marx, Capital
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
• DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Wiesel, Night