Ranging in topics from literature to philosophy to physics and in time periods from ancient to modern, these great written works seek to inspire, challenge, and deepen your faith and understanding.

The books listed below have been used in recent University Scholars courses. Changes will occur from year to year.

See what this UScholar told etc Magazine about several of these books.

USCH 1000 University Scholars Seminar

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook (Holsinger)
• Unexpected News: Reading the Bible With Third World Eyes by Robert Brown
• Child of the Dark by Carolina Maria De Jesus (Neuhouser)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• Tools of the Empire by Daniel R. Headrick (Holsinger)
• The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors
• A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas
• 1491 by Charles Mann (Neuhouser)
• Bruchko by Bruce Olson (Neuhouser)
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

USCH 1111 Classics

• The Iliad by Homer
• History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• Republic by Plato
• Ethics by Aristotle
• Aeneid by Virgil
• Metamorphoses by Ovid

USCH 1112 Renaissance

• Confessions by Augustine
• Inferno by Dante
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• Utopia by Thomas More
• Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
• Paradise Lost by John Milton

USCH 1113 Modernity

• The New Organon (selections) by Francis Bacon
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (selections) by John Locke
• Candide by Voltaire
• Critique of Judgment (selections) by Immanuel Kant
• The Phenomenology of Mind (selections) by W.F. Hegel
• Romantic poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• On Liberty (selections) by John Stuart Mill
• The Origin of the Species (selections) by Charles Darwin
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

USCH 1114 Globalization

• Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
• The Travels of a T-Shirt by Pietra Rivoli
• Runaway World by Anthony Giddens
• Assault on Paradise by Conrad Kottak
• The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

UFDN 1000 Honors Christian Formation

• Confessions by Augustine
• Silence by Shusaku Endo
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Your Neighbor's Hymnal by Jeff Keuss
• Spiritual Classics ed. by Richard Foster

USCH 3910 Faith and Science I

• The Tests of Time: Readings in the Development of Physical Theory, ed. by Lisa Dolling and Glenn Statile
• A Science and Religion Primer by Heidi Campbell and Heather Looy
• The Language of God by Francis Collins
• When Science and Christianity Meet by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers
• Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy by Michael Polayni

USCH 4910 Faith and Science II

• Seven Pillars of Creation by William Brown
• The Language of God by Francis Collins
• Living With Darwin: Evolution Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher
• Lying Awake: A Novel by Mark Salzman

USCH 4950 Christianity and Scholarship

• How to Write a BA Thesis by Charles Lipson
• The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship by George Marsden
• The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education by Jens Zimmermann and Norman Klossen

Literature for University Scholars courses varies from year to year.  For up-to-date information about reading requirements, students should contact their course instructor.

For more information about the University Scholars program, refer to the University Undergraduate Catalog. You may also contact Jeff Keuss, director of University Scholars, at keussj@spu.edu or 206-281-2093.