Register Your High Schooler for Great Books Summer Seminar

This summer, Great Books is hosting a seven-day seminar at Pepperdine from June 21 to June 27, 2026, for students entering eighth grade through graduating seniors.

This intensive one-week Great Books seminar offers your high schooler an opportunity to explore the enduring theme of Love through a distinctly Christian worldview in the intimate and beautiful setting of Pepperdine University’s Malibu campus. Students will meet new friends and engage in lively, Socratic-style seminars and discussions led by Dr. John Kern, who teaches Great Books and Religion at Pepperdine.

What They Will Study:

• Ancient Philosophy: Discover Plato’s complex theory of philosophical love from select speeches in the Symposium.
• Epic & Poetry: Unpack the passionate and tragic dynamics of love in classical literature from selections of Euripides’s Medea and Virgil’s Aeneid.
• Christian Charity: Examine the distinctiveness of the Christian understanding of love found in selections from St. Augustine, Martin Luther King, Jr., and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.
• The Nature of Romance and Fidelity: Explore the complex theme of romantic love through one of Marie de France’s Lais as well as the classic example of young love in Ferdinand and Miranda of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Students' minds will be sharpened as they gain an experience that prepares them for the relationships and challenges they face today and sets them apart as they move forward in their academic journeys.

For a limited time only, Pepperdine Staff/Faculty can enroll their children for $500 using the code PepperdineFacultyEarlyBird for the non-residential type ticket.
 
Register here.