Virtual Reading Groups

with Richard Gunderman

The Book of Genesis, which has as strong a claim as any to be the source text of Western civilization, devotes considerable attention to the themes of freedom and responsibility. For example, in the Garden… more

with Todd Estes

This VRG will discuss seven of the 85 essays on the US Constitution known as the Federalist Papers or sometimes just The Federalist. They were composed by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison,… more

Co-written with John Fletcher, this play comes from “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which took it from a poem by Boccaccio. We will think about literary influence here, of course, but also explore the play’s… more

Thomas Jefferson wrote that in drafting the Declaration of Independence he meant to give expression to “the American mind.” What does this mean? What does the Declaration tell us about the American mind as it relates to the… more

Debates surrounding public policy often bifurcate the world into private markets and government. When social and/or economic problems arise, pundits are quick to propose government solutions to so-called failures of private… more

Spontaneous (Dis)Order: Enlightenment Thinkers on Anarchist Thought, is designed to explore the intellectual lineage from Enlightenment thought to the development of modern anarchism. Anarchism’s emphasis on decentralization,… more

Soviet writer Isaac Babel said of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” The novel’s author seems to be especially interested in the contrast between the artificial and the… more

with Alice Temnick

This is the fourth in our series of Timeless reading groups about Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy. For this discussion, we will read and discuss the novella “French Wines and Politics.”… more

Two of the great works of contemporary political philosophy – John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia – have turned 50 in recent years. The aim of these two one-day VRGs is to explore… more

Possibly Shakespeare’s earliest, and definitely one of his least popular plays, Two Gentlemen of Verona, winds its way through young love, betrayal, violence, treachery, and even pirates before settling on a happy ending. What… more

James Baldwin’s masterfully written The Fire Next Time is a timeless exploration of racial injustice. This reading group will discuss this revolutionary book as well as supplemental readings on slavery, civil rights,… more