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What makes a written work eternal—its message still so fundamental to the way we live that it continues to speak to us, hundreds or thousands of years distant from the lifetime of its author? Why do we still respond to an ancient Greek playwright's tale of the Titan so committed to humanity's survival that he is willing to endure eternal torture in his defiance of the gods? To the cold advice of a 16th-century Florentine exiled from the corridors of power? To the words of a World War I German veteran writing of the horrors of endless trench warfare?

Total of 36 lectures. Group will cover 1-2 a meeting with discussion to follow. Come to one, or come to all!

1 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
2 Homer, Iliad
3 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
4 Bhagavad Gita
5 Book of Exodus
6 Gospel of Mark
7 Koran
8 Gilgamesh
9 Beowulf
10 Book of Job
11 Aeschylus, Oresteia
12 Euripides, Bacchae
13 Plato, Phaedo
14 Dante, The Divine Comedy
15 Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice
16 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
17 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
18 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
19 George Orwell, 1984
20 Virgil, Aeneid
21 Pericles, Oration; Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
22 Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
23 Confucius, The Analects
24 Machiavelli, The Prince
25 Plato, Republic
26 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
27 Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d'Arthur
28 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1
29 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 2
30 Henry David Thoreau, Walden
31 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
32 Lord Acton, The History of Freedom
33 Cicero, On Moral Duties (De Officiis)
34 Gandhi, An Autobiography
35 Churchill, My Early Life; Painting as a Pastime; WWII
36 Lessons from the Great Books