Text Choices (4828) – Required Texts & Reading List

Course: Jews, Greeks, and Romans: Foundations of Catholic Culture (Elective) Institution: Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary Term: Spring 2018

Welcome to the official Text Choices (4828) page for “Jews, Greeks, and Romans: Foundations of Catholic Culture,” a Spring 2018 elective at Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary. This page lists every required and recommended text for the course, so seminarians, auditors, and prospective students can plan their reading and source affordable copies of each title before the first session.

This seminary elective explores the foundations of Catholic culture through direct contact with the three classical languages that shaped the Church: Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Classical Latin. The Text Choices (4828) reading list below pairs practical language study with the great essays on Jewish, Greek, and Roman contributions to the Catholic religious and intellectual tradition.

The primary goal of this Catholic culture course is to help seminarians deepen their appreciation of the enormous contributions made by the Jewish, Greek, and Roman religious and intellectual traditions through direct contact with the languages of each – Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Classical Latin. Study is not limited to alphabets, declensions, and conjugations. It extends to the many observable contributions each tradition has made to Catholic religious and intellectual culture.

The first three quarters of the course attend not only to the spelling and grammar of each culture, but also to the songs, creedal statements, and prayers that reveal their deepest values and concerns. We begin with Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which illustrates the struggle of passing on to the next generation the most beloved commitments to God and to human beings shared across cultures and faiths. Each of these three traditions became important to people far beyond the linguistic and national boundaries of their homelands.

For the language sessions, students taking Text Choices (4828) for credit should obtain at least one of the following three classical-language texts and borrow the others. All three are widely available online for far less than their original prices.

For the discussions of cultural contributions, the course examines the following essays on the foundations of Western Christian culture. All participants taking Text Choices (4828) for credit must have access to a copy of each work below and be prepared to read and discuss it.

Depending on class size, language sessions may be shortened to leave enough class time for participant presentations in the final two sessions. Our purpose is to grapple with the alphabets, declensions, and conjugations of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin while attending to the achievements of each tradition, and to discover how reading, even the very sound of these languages when read or sung, reveals more about a culture than one might expect. Each student is encouraged to adjust reading and study time to keep the workload manageable.

Unless there is widespread demand for a final exam, grades depend on oral contributions during the course and on a presentation of a particular topic of interest by students taking the course for credit. Auditors are welcome.