Books - George Fox Honors Program Reading List

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)

• 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
• Exodus & Leviticus
• Homer’s Odyssey
• A PreSocratic Reader 2^nd
• 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 & Job
• Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric
• Proverbs & Ecclesiastes
• Confucius’ The Analects
• Aristotle’s Politics
• Greek lyric poetry (public domain selections)
• Song of Solomon & Jeremiah

• Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapter 7
• Matthew
• Qur’an
• Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
• Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
• Anselm’s Why God Became Man
• 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 Heloise
• 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

• Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 8-10
• 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 Atlantis
• 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

• Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 11-13
• Mark
• 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 Papers
• 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 Douglas
• Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum,” “Gettysburg Address,” “Second Inaugural,” 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th 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

• Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 14-16
• John
• 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 Manifesto
• 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 Karenina
• 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)

• Civilization: A New History of the Western World, chapters 17-18
• 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 Works
• 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 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

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.