Basic Program of Liberal Education

Past Courses

BPMSSYM15

UnCommon School at Morningstar Summer 2023 1/2 Day Symposium

BPMSMINI21

UnCommon School at Morningstar Summer 2023 3-week course.

Supreme Court
BASC80027

The Supreme Court of the United States will be completing its 2022-23 term this summer.  In this course, we will read and discuss a selection of its most important decisions.  Cases likely to be...

Photo of a small town in a heavily wooded area
BASC50026

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time....”

These four lines open the last stanza of the last...

Black-and-white portrait of Orestes Brownson.
BASC80011

Orestes Brownson's The American Republic is an incredible post-Civil War Tocquevillian take on the founding and destiny of these United States. In a style that blends history, theology, philosophy...

The word "Poetry" printed in black ink on white paper on a typewriter.
BASC70190

If it is true that poetry gives us knowledge, as some prominent critics claim, then we can ask, first, what kind of knowledge, and second, how should we read in order to acquire it? This class is...

art of brevity
BASC70231

The form of the short story is unique and hard to characterize, being at once, as Flannery O’Connor puts it, “one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression,” and, in the modern...

White text on a red background reads "The Sound and the Fury. William Faulkner."
BASC70180

An exploration of the thesis that the novel is the most important and most distinctively modern form of Western art, insofar as it aims to represent the totality of life, and to do so in a way that...

An illustration from Don Quixote
BASC70168

Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all novels, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists. There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know...

Beckett's Three Novels
BASC70215

With the Three Novels of Beckett, we reach a zero point in the development of the novel: here reading is no longer a matter a of self-enhancement but rather becomes a kind of kenosis (“self-emptying”)...