The Saint Augustine School Literary Tradition

This course offers a rich and insightful introduction to teaching four cornerstone works of Western literature—Beowulf, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—through the wisdom and expertise of classical Christian educators.

Dr. Junius Johnson guides readers through the key themes and teaching approaches for each work. From the heroic code and the question of kingship in Beowulf, to the psychological and theological depths of Hamlet, and the dark spiritual trajectory of Macbeth, Dr. Johnson reveals the enduring moral and metaphysical questions that animate these texts.

In the lectures on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dr. Armetta offers both literary and historical context for Mark Twain’s seminal American novel. Her analysis is complemented by a practical discussion on pedagogy, including suggested assignments and assessments., and a follow-up conversation exploring further strategies for classroom discussion and student engagement.

Together, these lessons model how to teach classic literature in a way that is intellectually rigorous, spiritually enriching, and pedagogically sound.

Dr. Junius Johnson—a classical Christian educator, author, and Yale-trained scholar of theology, philosophy, and literature—opens this course with a definition of faerie and fairyland, lays out the usefulness of fairy stories within a classical curriculum, and gives demonstrations of how to teach from these stories using Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market” along with other classic and contemporary sources. Johnson shows how the task of educating rhetoric students is, in part, about the re-enchantment of the student’s mind and heart, enabling them to see the mythic truth that characterizes the cosmos.

Flora Armetta earned her doctorate in 19th-century literature in 2009 from Columbia University and has written for The New Yorker and the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, among other publications. She has lectured on art and literature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Columbia University. She currently is an upper-school humanities educator at Covenant Christian Academy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and formerly served as Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities at CUNY / Guttman Community College in New York City.