Icon of the Transfiguration of Our Lord on Mount Tabor

Note: Information on the adult education classes now being offered by the Transfiguration Institute is available here.

The Great Books Curriculum

Transfiguration College will offer a single undergraduate program in the liberal arts using the great books of Western Civilization and Christianity. The books themselves are the teachers, with tutors present to serve, like Socrates, as intellectual midwives, helping students to give birth to their own ideas.

The books in our curriculum have been selected to engage students in the persistent questions of human existence and reveal how the greatest minds in history have dealt with these questions. This study will develop the intellectual and moral virtues necessary to form students into citizens who are fully conscious of their social and moral obligations.

For more information on the value of a Great Books education and the mission of Transifguration College, see our Statement of Educational Purpose [PDF], or "Red Book."

The Great Books of Western Civilization

The list of the Great Books of the western world—including the whole Greco-Roman world, both East and West—was compiled over fifty years ago by University of Chicago professors Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. These books represent the "Great Discussion" held across the centuries on all the important aspects of human life. In them we encounter the great ideas that have shaped our world.

A number of Great Books colleges have been founded on the principle that a classical liberal education can be rooted in the direct study of these important books. The premise of these colleges is that students can understand—and be transformed by—the great ideas without needing those ideas "repackaged" by later scholars. Transfiguration College is one of these colleges.

Transfiguration College builds on these principles with a curriculum suited to an Eastern Christian. This means above all a special emphasis on reading the Early Church Fathers, especially the Eastern Fathers, so that students can better understand the Byzantine expression of their Faith in Jesus Christ, and recognize how early Christian writers have left their mark on our world.

The Transfiguration Curriculum

The curriculum of Transfiguration College is still under development. The following is a partial list of texts being considered. The curriculum will be finalized by the end of summer 2005.

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