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William Penn Honors Program

Books - George Fox Honors Program Reading List

Following are proposed texts for each of the respective courses.

  • Open item Close item HNRS 120: Honors Orientation (1 hour)

    Before the program, read:

    • Parker Palmer’s To Know as We Are Known
    • Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book
    • Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning
    • Simon Greenleaf, chapter from Servant Leadership (1977)
  • Open item Close item HNRS 150: Origins: Athens and Jerusalem (6 hours)
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 1-3
    • Genesis
    • The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Epic of Creation, The Descent of Ishtar, and Nergal and Ereshkigal, from Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
    • Homer’s Iliad Homer's IliadPlato's The Republic
    • Exodus & Leviticus
    • Homer’s Odyssey
    • A PreSocratic Reader 2nd
    • Numbers & II Kings
    • Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays
    • Euripides’ Medea, Iphigenia at Aulis and The Trojan Women
    • Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War
    • Plato’s Apology, Phaedo and Gorgias
    • Plato’s The Republic
    • I Chronicles & JobConfucius' The Analects
    • Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric
    • Proverbs & Ecclesiastes
    • Confucius’ The Analects
    • Aristotle’s Politics
    • Greek lyric poetry (public domain selections)
    • Song of Solomon& Jeremiah
  • Open item Close item HNRS 190: Rome Through Early Church
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 4-6
    • Lamentations & MalachiOvid's MetamorphosesMarcus Aurelius' Meditations
    • Plutarch’s Selected Lives
    • Ovid’s Metamorphoses
    • Psalms 1-79
    • Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome
    • Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
    • Cicero’s The Orator: Selected Essays
    • Virgil’s Aeneid
    • Luke
    • Acts
    • Selections from Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Amma Syncletica of Alexandria, and Theodora of Alexandria
    • Justin Martyr’s First Apology, Second Apology
    • Tertullian’s ApologySt. Augustine's Confessions
    • Eusebius’ The History of the Church
    • Athanasius’ On the Incarnation
    • Psalms 81-150
    • Cyril of Alexandria’s On the Unity of Christ
    • Roman lyric poetry (selected public domain sources)
    • Creeds of the Church
    • Augustine’s Confessions
  • Open item Close item HNRS 250: Medieval Western Civilization
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapter 7
    • Matthew
    • Qur’anBoethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
    • Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
    • Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
    • Anselm’s Why God Became ManSt. Augustine's Confessions
    • Beowulf
    • Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed
    • Averroes’ The Incoherence of the Incoherence (volume 1) 
    • Aquinas’ Summa Theologica
    • Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias
    • John of Salisbury’s The Statesman’s Book
    • Dante’s Inferno
    • Peter Abelard’s The Letters of Abelard and HeloiseChaucer’s Canterbury Tales
    • Bonaventure’s Soul’s Journey Into God, Tree of Life, Life of Francis
    • St. Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi’s Francis and Clare: The Complete Works
    • Marie de France’s The Lais of Marie de France
    • Jude & Revelation
    • Catherine of Sienna’s Little Talks with God
    • Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
  • Open item Close item HNRS 290: Late Medieval and Early Modern Western Civilization
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 8-10Cervantes' Don Quixote and Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies
    • William of Ockham’s Philosophical Writings: Selections
    • Julian of Norwich’s Revelations
    • Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies
    • Machiavelli’s The Prince
    • Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
    • Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly
    • Romans & II Corinthians
    • Martin Luther’s Lectures on Galatians, Two Kinds of Righteousness, Freedom of a Christian
    • John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
    • Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote
    • Francis Bacon’s The New AtlantisPenses, Pilgrim's Progress, and Paradise Lost
    • William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet
    • William Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream, As You Like It, selected sonnets
    • The Arabian Nights, ed. Richard Burton
    • John Donne poetry
    • Rene Descartes’ Meditations of First Philosophy
    • Pascal’s Pensees
    • I Thessalonians & Philemon
    • John Locke’s Second Treatise
    • George Fox’s Journal
    • Margaret Fell’s Letters
    • John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress
    • John Milton’s Paradise Lost
  • Open item Close item HNRS 350: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 11-13
    • MarkEnglish Romantic Poetry
    • Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals
    • John Wesley’s The Essential Works of John Wesley
    • English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron
    • David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
    • John Woolman’s Journal
    • Jonathan Edwards’ The Religious Affections
    • Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The First and the Second Discourses and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)
    • U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution and The Federalist PapersWalden
    • Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, A Tragedy
    • Soren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
    • Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods
    • Selections from the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman
    • Frederick Douglas’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick DouglasNarrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
    • Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum,” “Gettysburg Address,” “Second Inaugural,” 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
    • Hebrews & James
    • Christina Rossetti’s poems
    • John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
    • Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
    • Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
    • Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps
  • Open item Close item HNRS 390: Russia, Asia, and Authoritarian Impulses
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 14-16
    • JohnThe Art of War, Communist Manifesto
    • Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching
    • Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
    • Buddhist Scriptures
    • Marasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji
    • Bhagavad-Gita
    • Al-Ghazali’s On the Incoherence of the Philosophers
    • Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist ManifestoCrime and Punishment
    • Mao Tse-Tung, selected works
    • Deng Xiaoping, selected works
    • Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
    • Mohandas Gandhi’s All Men are Brothers 
    • I Peter & 3 John
    • Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
    • Leo Tolstoy’s Anna KareninaOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals 
    • The Way of a Pilgrim and other classics of Russian spirituality
    • V.I. Lenin’s The State and Revolution
    • Benito Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism 
    • Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden, ed. Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Zaman
    • Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Class Day Exercises” (1978), Lech Walesa, “Nobel Lecture,” (1983), Ronald Reagan, “Speech at the Brandenburg Gate” (1987)
  • Open item Close item HNRS 450: 20th Century
    • Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 17-18Heretics by G.K. Chesterton
    • Émile Durkheim’s Rules of the Sociological Method
    • G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics
    • Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
    • Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker
    • Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
    • Flannery O’Connor, short stories from Collected WorksWise BloodMere Christianity
    • John Dewey’s How We Think
    • Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
    • C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity
    • T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems
    • Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
    • Jacques Ellul: Watch Ellul's six-part series “The Betrayal by Technology”
    • Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail
    • Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    • Jacques Derrida’s Gift of DeathThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Gift of Death
    • Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
    • Judith Butler’s “Imitation & Gender Insubordination,” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and Luce Irigaray’s “The Question of the Other”
    • John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio
    • Toni Morrison’s Beloved
    • Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    • Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow
    • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship
  • Open item Close item HNRS 490: Integration Thesis

    This course is intended to be the pinnacle of the honors program at George Fox University. Over the past four years you have explored a wide range of great and influential works. Your horizons have been broadened, your knowledge increased, and your critical skills sharpened. Most significantly, we have thought together about western civilization from a Christian perspective. 

    As a culmination of this program, we ask you to contribute to the store of western knowledge. The contribution will usually take the form of a scholarly paper or work of art, but other possibilities may be negotiated with the director of the honors program and a faculty sponsor.

    This project may be combined with another senior capstone project as long as all relevant parties agree on requirements. Normally, combined projects will need to be larger and/or more sophisticated than a single project. The following syllabus is for an integrative thesis not written in conjunction with another project.