Recorded HS

A Contrast of Kings: Macbeth and Julius Caesar (Catholic Shakespeare Series)

Our course will very briefly review that evidence and then place its focus on examining the two plays most widely read by high school students. Although set in Scotland of the 11th century and Rome of the 1st century BC, both plays comment clearly and powerfully on the sad situation of the Catholic Church, outlawed and persecuted in Shakespeare’s England. Both dramas end with victory for Christ’s Holy Bride that cannot, for long, be suppressed.

Live HS

C.S. Lewis and The Screwtape Letters

Register for this course early as we expect it to fill and close! Lewis’ imaginative explications of the conditions of Hell and our sinful “thoughts” are the best of their kind in the last 700 years!

Live HS

Dante’s Inferno

Join Dr. Russell and your fellow students to learn why Dante is the greatest author of the greatest book on the greatest subject of any ever written by a man not known by the Church to be directly inspired by God!

Recorded HS

Dante’s Paradiso (Heaven) by Dante (Divine Comedy Series)

Dante teaches us what it means to be a Catholic in every element of our thought and culture. His work is not only sublimely beautiful but filled with the most important truths. The Comedy provides a vision of eternity in order to teach man how to live in time, in his brief excursus before forever.

Recorded HS

Introduction to Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Register for this course to meet the “real” GK Chesterton and learn from one of the greatest Catholic minds of modern times. In this Chesterton primer, we will study how his work speaks to us today and what we can glean from his sense of wonder and joy.

Recorded HS

The Silmarillion

Register today and go deep into the stories behind The Fellowship of the Ring. The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s vast “myth” of the spiritual love of the Father and his mighty creations, the Ainur, who together create the harmonious cosmos. That harmony and love is harmed by a demonic vanity in one of the Ainur, Melkor, so that almost eternal warfare enters creation and is centered upon the earth.

Recorded HS

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) (Victorian Classics)

One of the most famous novels of the mid-Victorian period, Jane Eyre exemplifies the Bildungsroman (“coming-of-age”) genre, and, in fact, radically defined that genre in the English literary tradition. Our studies will also address the novel’s biographical and historical context, providing insight into the mid-Victorian Period. In this course, we will come to know Jane Eyre and the remarkable novel that bears her name, studying both over six classes.

Recorded HS

Purgatorio (Purgatory) by Dante (Divine Comedy Series)

Dante Alighieri is the only “secular” author in praise of whom a Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church has written an encyclical letter. His Holiness Benedict XV’s “In Praeclara Summorum” of 1921 rightly says, “We admire in him not only supreme height of genius but also the immensity of the subject which holy religion put to his hand. If his genius was refined by meditation and long study of the great classics it was tempered even more gloriously, as We have said, by the writings of the Doctors and the Fathers which gave him the wings on which to rise to a higher atmosphere than that of restricted nature.”