Teaching

As I see it, the purpose of a Christian education is to help students fulfill the twin commandments of Matthew 22: to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, and mind, and to love their neighbor as themselves. Whatever the text or topic before us, I seek to equip students not only with the knowledge and wisdom of the philosophical tradition, but with the virtues and skills that will serve them in every part of their lives.

Four priorities guide how I design and teach my courses. First, I want students to know themselves as inheritors of a rich intellectual tradition and members of a broad community still wrestling with perennial questions, and to be able to articulate its central ideas with clarity and precision. Second, I want them to read carefully and charitably, granting each author due respect while engaging their arguments in earnest. Third, I want them to build and express arguments of their own in writing with clarity and brevity. And finally, I want them to treat one another with charity, grace, and civility, especially across real disagreement. To these ends my classrooms are collaborative and discussion-driven, built around close reading, seminar conversation, and frequent low-stakes work, so that students leave not merely knowing more, but better prepared to think and to live well.

Teaching Record

Saint Constantine College

Below is a record of some of the works I have led in discussion, by period, along with lectures delivered and courses taught within the College.

Texts Taught

Scripture

• Genesis
• Exodus
• Leviticus
• Numbers
• Deuteronomy
• 1 & 2 Kings
• Isaiah
• Daniel & Esther
• Gospel of Luke
• Gospel of John
• Pauline Epistles

Greek and Roman

• Homer, Iliad
• Homer, Odyssey
• Presocratics
• Plato, Apology
• Plato, Charmides
• Plato, Euthyphro
• Plato, Greater and Lesser Hippias
• Plato, Meno
• Plato, Phaedo
• Plato, Phaedrus
• Plato, Philebus
• Plato, Protagoras
• Plato, Republic
• Plato, Theaetetus
• Plato, Timaeus
• Aristotle, De Anima
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• Aristotle, Politics
• Cicero, Republic (De re publica)

Patristic and Byzantine

• St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
• St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology
• Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy
• St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Holy Images
• St. Seraphim of Sarov, Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 1
• St. Gregory Palamas, The Philokalia

Medieval (Latin West)

• Anselm, Monologion, Proslogion, On the Procession of the Holy Spirit
• Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God
• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Divine Nature
• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness
• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Appendix on Purgatory
• Averroes, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy
• Dante, De Monarchia
• Dante, Inferno
• Dante, Purgatorio
• Dante, Paradiso

Renaissance and Early Modern

• Sidney, The Defense of Poesy
• The Creeds of the Churches (Council of Trent; Confession of Dositheus)
• Descartes, Meditations
• Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Locke, Second Treatise of Government
• Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
• Rousseau, Émile, or On Education
• Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Shakespeare (Plays)

• Hamlet
• Julius Caesar
• King Lear
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Richard II
• Richard III
• The Tempest

Nineteenth Century

• Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History
• Tocqueville, Democracy in America
• Newman, The Idea of a University
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Darwin, On the Origin of Species
• Marx, The Communist Manifesto
• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Twentieth Century

• Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
• T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems
• W. H. Auden, Collected Poems
• Solzhenitsyn, Nobel & Templeton Lectures
• Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait
• John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them
• H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture
• Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
• Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray
• Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition
• Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Lectures Delivered

• Aquinas for Dante Lovers
• German Philosophy in the 19th Century
• Hume, Berkeley, and Kant
• Introduction to Aristotle
• Introduction to Enlightenment Philosophy
• Introduction to Romanticism
• Locke & Empiricism

Courses

• PHL 310: Logic — x4
• PHL 405: Epistemology and Religious Disagreement

The Saint Constantine School

• Introduction to Political Philosophy — x2
• Senior Ethics Seminar — x3
• Senior Thesis Capstone

Baylor University

• PHI 1306: Logic — x3
• PHI 1306H1: Honors Logic