The depth and beauty of the great books reveal themselves when we slow down to give them the time they deserve...

New Seminars begin in April and May!

Rousseau, First and Second Discourses

Sundays, 10:00-11:20 am ET | April 5-June 28, 2026

Has the progress of civilization made us better or worse? In his First Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences corrupt morality rather than improve it. In the Second Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, he traces how natural human freedom was lost to society, property, and political power. Together these texts form one of the most radical and searching critiques of modern civilization ever written. We'll read about 12 pages a week, allowing us time to work through important passages line by line. No background in philosophy is necessary. Beginners are welcome.

Text: Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated and edited by John T. Scott (University of Chicago Press)

Reading load: 10-15 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jess Joseph is a graduate of the University of Chicago and has led great books reading groups on Plato's Theaetetus, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed.

Shakespeare, Reading the Sonnets Aloud (6 sessions)

Mondays, 3:20-4:50 pm ET | May 4-June 15, 2026

Free session on April 20

Let us read Shakespeare's poetry out loud, as he intended it! Bear witness to Shakespeare’s sonnets, as observers of their unfolding and as participants who enact the experience of the speaker. Recitation allows us to enter each sonnet, and hear meanings that only the human voice can convey. Although this is not an acting class, we will familiarize ourselves with the rules of iambic pentameter, classical acting, acting theory, and a few fundamentals about meter, enjambment, elision, overfull lines, French endings, etc. If Shakespeare found language that puts us back into sympathy with our nature, then we already have what we need by virtue of our experiences. For non-actors; beginners welcome.

Text: Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997, 696 pp. ISBN 978-0674637122 (pb).

Reading load: 1-2 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Tim Pabon and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga.  Tim is a seasoned, classically trained stage actor and voice actor, having worked with the Folger Shakespeare in DC, and also the Renaissance Spanish repertory.  Reynaldo is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter, and has led seminars for Symposium since it was founded 20 years ago. 

Borges, Poems

Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 pm ET | April 7-June 30, 2026

Description

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Leaders: Miryam Bujanda and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga. Miryam is a poet and teaches at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio TX, and is a Macondo Writer’s Workshop alumna. (see Reynaldo's bio above)

Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 pm ET | April 7-June 30, 2026

After his wife’s suicide in 1885, Henry Adams tried to think through the topsy-turvy contemporary world and his own life in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913). He views the High Middle Ages as a civilization that had built and nurtured a transcendental unity as he leads the reader on a pilgrimage back in time, through a veiled confession, to a homecoming. Adams introduced Americans to a half-forgotten past. This seminar is a prelude to The Education of Henry Adams which will be offered in the summer.

Text: Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 402 pp., paperback ISBN 9780691003351

Reading Load:  25-30 pp./week.

Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter.  He has led seminars with Symposium for 20 years and with other organizations for the last 25 years.   

How to Read a Great Book: Plato's Meno with Klein Commentary

Tuesdays, 8:50-10:20 pm ET | April 7-June 30, 2026

How to Read a Great Book: Plato's Meno with Jacob Klein's Commentary on Plato's Meno. This is the first in a series of seminars aiming to help us to become better, more careful readers. Are all great books to be read in the same manner? No: each traverses distinct terrains in different ways, each asks questions different in kind that demand fitting methods of inquiry.  Plato's Seventh Letter asks to be read on its own terms and in a way appropriate to it, which are different from his Republic, and both of which are different from his Laws, and so on. This short dialogue (the Meno) is a good introduction to Plato's works and Socratic inquiry in general.  After a close reading, we will turn to one of the best commentaries on the Meno and on Platonic dialogues in general -- sometimes a "secondary" work comes very close to the original and can thereby show us how to improve our reading.  Beginners and Intermediate-level welcome.

Texts: Plato, Meno, trans. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns, in the Focus Philosophical Library Series, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004, paperback ISBN 0941051714. Klein, Jacob, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965 (out of print); or, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, paperback ISBN 9780807873984.

Reading Load: App. 25 pp/week.

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel. Reynaldo is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter, and has led Symposium seminars since it's founding 20 years ago, and for other organizations for the last 25. Jason is a visiting professor in ethics and political philosophy at Framingham State University. Both have taken a life-long interest in Plato, and in Klein's work.

Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part I

Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30 pm ET | April 15-July 1, 2026

The King is dead! Long live the King... Fifty years of conflict, blood, treachery: the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, and the problem of hereditary succession with a line doubtfully descended from a usurpation only twenty-five years past and you have mayhem, mendacity, and enough moral murk to turn glory into miasma. The Henry VI plays give us a rich crop of character -- Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part 1), Cade’s Rebellion (Henry VI, Part 2), and the reign of King Edward IV (Henry VI, Part 3) -- which we will explore over the next three quarters. If you've read the other Henries (and Richards) but haven't quite found time to tackle Henry VI, now is a rare opportunity to read it with other Shakespeare super-fans.  

Reading load: several pages/week

Seminar Leader: Eric Stull holds degrees in Liberal Arts, Eastern Classics, Greek and Latin. He has taught high-school history and English, and writing and literature in nine colleges and universities for past 20 years.

Intricate, Imperfect, Various Things - E.E. Cummings' Is 5 (5 sessions) 

Wednesdays, TBA pm ET | April 29-May 27, 2026

 With a simplicity of innovation and a playfulness of being, E.E. Cummings' fifth volume of poetry Is 5 (1926) gives readers the full feel of what modern poetry means to a modern world. Indeed, it is a world of lovers, drunks, seducers, collected souls and all the funny people you meet on the streets of your heart - just the verb of it all and told with a beauty of word and punctuation as  tools for epiphany. There is no equal to the astonishment of a Cummings' poem; discover this wonderful collection of life as no parentheses, in 5 easy reading sessions.

Text: Is 5 by e.e. cummings.  Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1996, 128 pages.  ISBN: 0871401649

Reading Load:  15-20 pp (of poems)/week

Leader: Denise Ahlquist and JJ Patton have been leading literary seminars together for over 10 years.. Denise has a background in  English and literary theory at the College of Wooster and the University of Wisconsin - Madison plus years of leading Shared Inquiry discussions with the Great Books Foundation. This is complemented by JJ, an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh with a lifetime of writing and learning modern poetry.

Joyce, Ulysses

Wednesdays, 7:00-8:30 pm ET | April 7-June 24, 2026

Ulysses has a reputation for being difficult. And, at times, it can be -- especially if you are doing it by yourself. In this seminar, we’ll move step by step through Joyce’s account of a single day in Dublin, paying close attention to voice, structure, humor, and character. Rather than trying to “solve” the novel, we’ll aim to understand how it works and why it still matters. Along the way, we’ll lightly explore some of the book’s key literary connections, including Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Dante’s Inferno. These parallels will help orient us without overwhelming the primary task: reading Ulysses.  This course is designed for both first-time readers and those returning to the novel. The goal is simple: to make steady, thoughtful progress through one of the most important works of modern literature.

Reading load: multiple pages/week

Seminar Leader: Randy Wootton has a BS in English from the Naval Academy, an MALA from St John's College, and an MBA from Harvard. He has taught at both university and high school levels while doing time in the Corporate Sector. He is now going back to his roots to explore great books with great people!

Gospel of Mark

Thursdays, 8:50-10:20 pm ET | April 8-June 25, 2026

This seminar is part of a series on Jewish and Christian texts, which alternates Jewish and Christian sacred texts. Anyone who is interested in a pluralistic, serious (with some playfulness), conversational approach to religious texts, read for the purpose of understanding the text is invited to join each quarter. We like to think we are contributing to interfaith dialogue by not adopting a theory of interfaith dialogue, but by just doing it.

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel. (See Reynaldo's and Jason's bios above)

Tolstoy, War and Peace

Fridays, 3:20-4:50 pm ET | April 3 (through December), 2026

We have a Russian novel that begins in French and is about a war against the French; a novel that the author claimed wasn’t a novel at all; a 1460-page book with two nouns of seemingly equal weight in the title, yet unequal in their accounts. What sort of book is War and Peace? Why, the sort one has to read to find out. One might suppose that the only way to get through a very long book is to read it as quickly as possible. But what would be the point of just getting through the battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the conversations, the swirl of dancing, the lives of Natasha, Prince Andrei, and others? If life is for the living, then a book is for the reading, which we will do at the slow-and-savor rate.

Reading load: about 40 pages a week. War and Peace is divided into four Books and an Epilogue, each into Parts, and so on into Chapters.

Text: any good translation (Dunnigan, Maude; Maude, Briggs, Pevear; Volokhonsky)

Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull and Linda McConnell.

(P.S. This is not to be confused with the biography, "Leo Tolstoy" by Warren Pease.)

Xenophon, Symposium (6 sessions)

Saturdays, 6:30-7:45 pm ET | May 9 to June 20, 2026

Xenophon's Symposium is noticeably different from Plato's, especially as it is so lighthearted, with an utterly charming ending. Socrates and other guests attend a drinking party and take turns saying what each prides himself on. Comedy ensues. This convivial seminar offers an easy introduction to Socratic philosophy and how to read carefully. We'll read a few pages a week and note details that are easy to overlook. No background in philosophy is necessary. Beginners are not only welcome, but encouraged.

Text: Xenophon, Symposium (trans. Robert C. Bartlett), in The Shorter Socratic Writings, ed. Robert C. Bartlett.

Reading load: 8 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jason Happel is a visiting professor in ethics and political philosophy at Framingham State University.