Academics
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Too many courses today consist of in-class lectures based on reading assignments from expensive and quickly outdated textbooks.
Often the information in the textbook is simply regurgitated in the lecture, thus making the course content frustratingly redundant. The textbooks themselves summarize information that was first articulated in more nuanced and difficult primary sources. At the end of the course, the students take a test on the material covered in the lecture and the textbook, and their ability to recall information on the test determines their grade in the class. This results in students whose main skill is short-term memorization of second-hand information.
Saint Constantine College approaches class differently.
All of the time spent in our core Great Texts Tutorials is dedicated to in-depth Socratic discussion of key primary sources from world history. The readings proceed chronologically from the classics of the Ancient Middle East, Greece, and Rome through Late Antiquity and the Medieval World to the Modern Era.
Students grapple firsthand with the great ideas and stories that have shaped the contemporary world. In discussion they are challenged by their peers and professors to articulate what they think about these texts and why. Over time, they build a community of reading, discussion, and scholarship that encourages rigorous preparation for class discussions and learning to speak the truth in love concerning the most important questions that humanity has ever faced: questions of ethics, politics, religion, and human relationships.
We do not have time to waste on second-hand ideas watered down and soon forgotten. The great thinkers, teachers, and justice-seekers of the ages await our engagement, and at Saint Constantine, we rise to meet them.
Saint Constantine College offers students a robustly classical and uniquely Orthodox approach to undergraduate education.
Our curriculum is designed to familiarize students with the liberal arts, while providing a grounding in the robust Christian thought of both the Eastern and Western traditions. Whereas some Great Texts programs ignore the Christian and Islamic East, Saint Constantine College makes them central to our Great Texts curriculum.
Students who enroll in Saint Constantine College are helping to keep alive, in their own scholarship, the ancient traditions of individual tutorial learning, Socratic discussion, and the preservation of those texts, questions, and ideas without which the modern world would not exist.
The Bachelor of Arts in Great Texts of the Christian Tradition (GTCT) is an interdisciplinary course of study that apprentices students in the core texts and authors of the classical, Christian tradition, from Plato and the New Testament to Shakespeare and his modern inheritors.
In their Junior and Senior years, students choose one of two emphases for this degree: Literature and Religion, or Philosophy of Religion.
Learn more about the B.A. in Great Texts of the Christian Tradition