Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context is a selection of essays, presented or further developed from the 1999 Association of Core Texts and Courses conference in New Orleans, focusing on a few of the vertices or vortices, where an intensified sense of the interplay between the ways of knowledge may be glimpsed, or a memorable moment in the past when all briefly achieved a greater congruity may be revived for new consideration. These essays fall into an organization according to the major scheme each posits as unifying, or attempting to unify, the liberal arts.

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Acknowledgments Chapter 3 Practically Educated: The ACTC Director's Address Chapter 4 On Education: Uniting Students' Learning Chapter 5 Waiting for Herot to Burn: The Core Vision of Beowulf Chapter 6 The Rewards of Reading Copernicus Chapter 7 (Re)discovering the Rationale for a Liberal Arts Core: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in Interdisciplinary Context Chapter 8 Knowledge, History, and the Creation of Human Nature Chapter 9 Teaching Students to Ask Questions About What They Read Chapter 10 Educating the Educators: Core Curriculum and Peripheral Faculty Chapter 11 From Wandering to Journeying with Core Texts in an Honors Curriculum Chapter 12 Acts of Reading: Chapter 13 Euclid Through Ages of Reason Chapter 14 The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading: Introduction to the Inferno as a Humanities Text Chapter 15 Prospero and the Times of Reading Chapter 16 Character and Reading: The Absent Speaker's Presence Chapter 17 Texts as Gathering Points: Chapter 18 At the Core of the Social Sciences: Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws Chapter 19 Teaching the Bhagavad-Gita in a Traditional Great Books Program Chapter 20 Confucius in Dialogue with the West and Today's Students Chapter 21 History in the Service of Life: A Dynamic Systems Approach to Intellectual History Chapter 22 What the Classics of Science Can Teach Us: Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine and Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? Chapter 23 The Ethical: Chapter 24 Tragedy, History, and Rhetoric in the Core: Sophocles and Thucydides Chapter 25 Adam Smith's Other Great Book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments Chapter 26 Questioning "Our Western Tradition" Chapter 27 Core Events as "Core" Context: The Holocaust as a Test Case Chapter 28 The City: Chapter 29 The Holy City Chapter 30 Dante and the Synthesis of the Medieval City Chapter 31 Shakespeare's Cities Chapter 32 Unraveling the City: "Bartleby" and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Chapter 33 The City in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Edited by Bainard Cowan and Scott Lee - Contributions by Stephen Zelnick; Eva Brown; Gregory Marks; Dana Densmore; Lucy Melbourne; Michael Hinz; Robert J. McMahon; Harvey Shulman; James F. Walter; Joan L. Richards; William Franke; Dennis L. Sepper; Virgin