Christians Reading Classics

Episod

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  Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, with Cara Rogers Stevens 13.08.2026 47min

  Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is one of those rare books that can feel like a museum archive, a political manifesto, and a personal notebook all at once, and it still shapes how Americans argue about freedom. We sit down with historian Cara Rogers Stevens (Ashland University), author of the award-winning Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, to ask a basic but uncomfortable question: what do we do with a “classic” that is brilliant, influential, and morally fraught? Chr...
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  Nolan's Odyssey and Epics with Jonathan Geltner, Eric Hutchinson, and Rob Wyllie 06.08.2026 1j 15min

  A Hollywood blockbuster can make “The Odyssey” feel like a parade of monsters and set pieces but Homer’s epic is stranger, quieter, and more demanding than that. We sit down with poets and scholars Jonathan Geltner, Eric Hutchinson, and Rob Wyllie to ask a deceptively basic question: what is an epic, really? The answer takes us from dactylic hexameter and oral performance to the way epic poetry can build a culture’s imagination of gods, duty, and the shape of reality itself. Christians Readin...
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  Augustine - Enchiridion and Morals of the Catholic Church with Joseph Lanier and Travis Montgomery 29.07.2026 57min

  A pastor asks Augustine for a short summary of the Christian life, and Augustine delivers a compact handbook that is so honest it practically stops mid-sprint when it reaches love. That tension, between real-life limits and real spiritual depth, is where our conversation lives today. We are joined by Joseph Lanier and Travis Montgomery, co-authors of *Every Perfect Gift: Classical Virtues for Christian Formation*, to explore why Augustine still trains our instincts for discipleship, moral the...
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  The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky with Maria Baer 23.07.2026 1j

  A foggy train pulls into St Petersburg and two young men face each other across a third-class carriage. That opening scene from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is our doorway into a novel that refuses to let anyone stay comfortable, especially when a pure-hearted man starts telling the truth in rooms built on performance. Nadia Williams talks with writer and reporter Maria Baer to talk about why 21st-century American Christians should still read this translated Russian classic. We dig into what makes...
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  Jack London: An American Classic with Elizabeth Stice 16.07.2026 36min

  Elizabeth Stice, professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University, joins to discuss Jack London as an American classic. They explore London's wild life — oyster pirate, hobo, Klondike adventurer — and how it shaped works like Call of the Wild, White Fang, John Barleycorn, and Martin Eden. Stice unpacks the tension between London's socialist sympathies and social Darwinist streak, and why Christians can find genuine value in a writer so openly skeptical of faith. Christians Reading Class...
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  The Declaration of Independence and the Classics with Brad Birzer 09.07.2026 1j 1min

  A single sentence can reorder a civilization, and “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is one of those sentences. Nadya Williams sits down with historian Dr Brad Birzer to read the Declaration of Independence closely and ask why it still sends a jolt through American politics, moral imagination, and public life 250 years later. Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member tod...
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  The Declaration of Independence with Matthew Spalding and Jake Meador 02.07.2026 1j 5min

  The Declaration of Independence is only a few paragraphs long, but it tries to do something enormous: justify a political break while teaching a moral vision of human equality, liberty, and rightful government. Nadya Williams and Jake Meador sit down with Dr Matthew Spaulding of Hillsdale College, a leading scholar of the Declaration and author of The Making of the American Mind, to read the document as an American classic that still forms our public arguments and our private conscience. — Ch...
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  Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis with Oliver Traldi 25.06.2026 1j 6min

  What does it mean to love someone well — and what does it cost when that love curls inward? Nadya Williams and Oliver Traldi discuss C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, tracing how Lewis reframes the myth of Cupid and Psyche to expose the jealousy beneath even the most devoted love, the limits of philosophy before the divine, and what it means to render an account of your own life. — Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to supp...
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  East of Eden with Philip Bunn & Matthew H. Young 18.06.2026 55min

  Steinbeck's East of Eden returns the Cain and Abel story twice over, tracing original sin, mimetic desire, and the fragile hope encoded in timshel across the arc of early American history. Philip Bunn and Matthew H. Young join host Nadya Williams to read Steinbeck as political theorist, moral cartographer, and reluctant humanist. — Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member toda...
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  James Fenimore Cooper with Dr. Wayne Franklin 11.06.2026 1j 4min

  James Fenimore Cooper gets filed away as “important” long before many of us actually read him, and that gap is the problem we wanted to solve. I’m joined by Dr. Wayne Franklin, one of the leading Cooper scholars and the author of major biographies of Cooper, to talk about what makes a classic live past its own pages. His definition sticks with me: a classic is a book that, once you start it, you realize you already know, because it has permeated the culture and taught later writers what stori...
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  The Journals of Lewis and Clark with Craig Fehrman 04.06.2026 55min

  We treat the Lewis and Clark journals as a true American classic, reading them for voice, humour, and human detail rather than just as a schoolbook summary. With historian Craig Furman, we follow the expedition through science, hardship, Native diplomacy, and the moral complexity that the journals preserve in plain sight. — Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at htt...
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  Augustine's Confessions with Joey Sherrard 28.05.2026 45min

  We sit with Augustine’s Confessions and feel how a 1,600-year-old prayer still names our restlessness with uncomfortable accuracy. We talk with pastor and author Joey Sherrard about reading Confessions as praise and truth-telling, and about remembering Augustine as a working pastor rather than a distant genius. — Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereort...
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  Cassiodorus and Classical Education with Joseph Griffith and Joshua Kinlaw 21.05.2026 56min

  Cassiodorus is the kind of historical figure who should be famous and somehow isn’t: a high-level Roman statesman who walks away from power and spends his later life trying to save Christian learning from collapse. That turn gives us one of the most unusual education texts in the Western tradition, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, a “book about books” written to stand in for teachers when war makes schools impossible. Nadya Williams talks with Joshua Kinlaw and Joe Griffith...
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  Petrarch's Canzoniere with A. M. Juster 14.05.2026 56min

  Petrarch's Canzoniere — 366 poems written over 40 years in pursuit of a woman named Laura — introduced the sonnet to European literature and helped move poetry from Latin into the vernacular. It is also, as A.M. Juster's new translation makes plain, a deeply Augustinian collection: raw, confessional, and unresolved. Nadya Williams talks with Juster about the art of poetic translation, the discipline it demands, and why Petrarch still matters. — Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from ...
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  The Great Gatsby with Katy Carl 07.05.2026 50min

  A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby still demands more of readers than its first audience was prepared to give. This conversation explores why Fitzgerald's third novel flopped in 1925, how its three-act tragic structure works, and what it means to read its vices and virtues with Christian eyes. Along the way: Fitzgerald's complicated Catholic formation, the role of beauty in a moral imagination, the state of American Christian fiction since the mid-century, and the case for wri...
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  Great American Sermons with John Wilsey and Daniel K. Williams [FULL EPISODE] 01.05.2026 1j 8min

  What does it mean for a nation to read its own sermons? This America 250 conversation takes up four of them — Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity, Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and King's Mountaintop Sermon — tracing covenant and city-on-a-hill exceptionalism, the personal terror of revival preaching, Lincoln's strange theological restraint amid civil war, and King's prescient final words. The episode closes on what it means to read the dead w...
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  Thomas Aquinas For Protestants with Miles Smith 23.04.2026 34min

  Can a Protestant read Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae without converting to Catholicism? Nadya Williams welcomes Miles Smith IV (Hillsdale College) to take up the question currently churning on social media. Miles argues yes — and that the more interesting question lies upstream: what do Christians do with Aristotle? Along the way, they consider the Summa's 13th-century context, its reception alongside Dante and through the Black Death, the Socratic shape of Aquinas's method, and why certa...
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  The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne with Jeff Bilbro | American 250 16.04.2026 50min

  Nadya Williams and Jeff Bilbro discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter — its Puritan setting, Hawthorne's fraught ancestry, and the novel's three responses to sin: moralistic judgment, escapist relativism, and Hester's redemptive middle path. They also touch on Hawthorne's friendships with the Transcendentalists, the dangers of cancel culture, and Jeff's forthcoming book on AI and creaturely intelligence. —— Get the free ebook Spiritual Formation for the Family at http://mereorth...
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  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Ivana Greco and Dixie Dillon Lane 09.04.2026 57min

  Nadya Williams, Ivana Greco, and Dixie Dillon Lane discuss Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — 150 years old this year — as a window into antebellum American childhood, the timeless challenge of raising boys, and what it means to read classics across generations. Why does Twain's rapscallion hero outlast Sid in the cultural imagination? What does Aunt Polly's long-suffering love reveal about providence and parenting? And which American classics deserve a second look in the y...
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  Moby Dick by Herman Melville with Christina Bieber Lake 02.04.2026 57min

  Nadya Williams and Christina Bieber Lake discuss Moby Dick — why Americans should read it, what Melville understood about arrogance and the uncontrollable, and how the novel's humor, sprawling cetology chapters, and the famous doubloon scene all serve a single theme: the tragedy of trying to master what cannot be mastered. — Get the free ebook Spiritual Formation for the Family by going to http://mereorthodoxy.com/family. Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is ...