This book asks what do we learn of texts, cultures, and the world’s dynamics when we read core texts, widely and deeply, in core-structured programs of the world’s colleges and universities? The answers offered are drawn from the widest possible spectrum of institutions and disciplines who offer horizon-expanding liberal educations.

Acknowledgments Introduction Robert D. Anderson, Molly Brigid Flynn, and J. Scott Lee Part I. A Good Mind Is Hard to Find Fate, Hope, and Clarity Richard Kamber Wrestling with the God(s) Benjamin W. Westervelt Teaching Frederick Douglass as a Master Rhetorician Hollis Robbins Teaching Arendt’s Eichmann in Jersualem as an Introduction to Philosophy Joshua A. Shmikler Using Fiction and Nonfiction by Barbara Kingsolver to Help Students Think across Disciplines Heather McGovern Part II. When Cultures Meet Montequieu’s Persian Letters and the Uses of Comparativism Henry C. Clark Ishmael’s Initiation into the Revelry of Work Emily Heyne Engaging Cultures: Is the Melting Pot Still Cooking? Lyndall Nairn The Problem with Engaging Worlds: E. M. Forster’s Suspicion of Culture Tim Mackin Tapestry: Christian and Classical Mélange in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and Perelandra Charles Fisher Part III. Modern, Postmodern, and Future Horizons Butler among the Mechanists: Fiction and Nonfiction in the Evolution of Machines (EREWHON as a Core Text) Dorion Sagan Beauty’s Contexts: Symposium Then and Now Mark Walter Descartes’s Doubt and the Beginning of the Modern World Neil G. Robertson Teaching Pascal in Modern and Postmodern Contexts Christopher Anadale Core Values and a Historicized Reading of Franklin’s Autobiography Vince J. Brewton Part IV. Challenges from Core Texts Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the Principle of Pleasure Spencer Hall Quantum Feline: The Prescience of Poe’s Black Cat J. Scott Miller “… He winces not”: The Souls of Black Folk as a Foundational Core Text Page Laws A Journey to Self: A Psychological Analysis of Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral Karen Y. Holmes Silko’s Ceremony as a Core Text: Natural and Unnatural Worlds Jean-Marie Kauth Part V. Political Worlds and Worldly Politics Socrates and Crito: Anxiety and the Engagement between the Empirical and Analytic (Ideal) Worlds of Athens Kieran M. Bonner Economics as a Force of Nature in Aristotle’s Politics: An Antireductionist View Molly Brigid Flynn Humanities Education and the Hidden Civic Virtue of Doubt Mark Blackell Toqueville and the Problem of Associational Autonomy Thomas M.J. Bateman Teaching about Evil and Politics Using Elie Wiesel’s Night Tim Meinke Part VI. Moral Images of Humankind Using Nussbaum to Link Socrates, Tartuffe, and Raise the Red Lantern with Today’s Global Citizen Kathleen A. Kelly Novel Knowledge in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons James N. Roney How to Illustrate Blind Ambition to a Business Student: Looking at the World through the Eyes of Dreiser’s The Financier Vincent Rama Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and the Pathologies of Moral Philosophy Irfan Khawaja