Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics is a podcast about classic books being read through a distinctly Christian lens. Hosted by author and classicist, Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics introduces—or should we say—re-introduces listeners to classic works that have inspired generations. Interviewing experts who know these books well, the hope is to inspire listeners and awaken their imagination to God's world through literary, theological, and even children's works that have stood the test of time. Christians Reading Classics is a Mere Orthodoxy podcast. Find out more at mereorthodoxy.com
Episodes
Poe doesn’t just write about ravens, floorboards, and crumbling mansions. He writes about what happens when the mind starts feeding on itself and you can’t tell whether the horror is out there, in here, or both. Steve Knepper and Father Ryan Dunn join to discuss three essential Edgar Allan Poe classics: “The Raven,” “The Telltale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and we as...
Moby-Dick is a whale hunt on the surface, but underneath it’s a confrontation with a world that won’t fully make sense. Kyle Harper, a historian of whales and the wider animal world, joins us to argue for Herman Melville’s masterpiece as the great American novel and to pin down what we really mean when we call something a “classic.” Kyle explains why timeless books survive changing tastes: they keep as...
A single sentence can hold an entire war: “All quiet on the Western Front.” That understatement is exactly why Erich Maria Remarque’s novel still haunts readers almost a century later, and why we wanted to slow down and read it carefully rather than treat it like a history lesson.
Today we are joined by Jason Barnhart, a peace theologian and professor of historical theology, to talk through the transparency...
A beautiful story can still be brutal, and Billy Budd proves it. Christine Norvell, author of The Sycamore Fig Tree, joins to discuss Melville’s unforgettable portrait of a sailor who seems almost made for admiration—which makes his tragedy that much more thought-provoking.
Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodo...
Aristotle is everywhere in Western civilization, but most of us meet him as a difficult assignment instead of a real human being with a complicated story. We sit down with classicist and biographer Philip Freeman, author of Aristotle: The First Teacher, to follow Aristotle from an out-of-the-way town in northern Greece to the intellectual pressure cooker of Plato’s Academy and then into his own ambitious project at the Lyceum...
We’re joined by Miles Werntz, associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University and editor of Nothing Can Separate Us: Healing for Souls and Nations, a reader of Thurman’s writings. Together we trace Thurman’s story from the segregated South to Morehouse and Howard University, through his journey to India to meet Mahatma Gandhi, and into his bold experiment of founding one of America’s earliest...
The complicated struggle of faith is no new phenomenon. Philosopher and novelist Daniel McInerny joins today to revisit Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and ask why this Catholic classic still feels like it is describing our own age, our own friendships, and our own hunger for beauty. Along the way, we tackle a surprisingly practical question for readers and writers alike: what is a classic, really? Not just a book that te...
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor known for his philosophical insights, penned his thoughts in a private notebook that became one of the most enduring classics of Western literature. In this episode, Nadya Williams speaks with Eric Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College, to delve into the essence of Aurelius's Meditations and the Stoic principles that shaped his life.
In this episode, we explore the enduring power of C.S. Lewis's 'Mere Christianity' and its place in the broader history of Christian apologetics. Daniel K. Williams, a historian and expert in apologetics, shares insights into what makes a work of apologetics a classic, how Lewis's work has influenced generations, and the evolving landscape of Christian defense strategies.
Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy ...
Wallace Stegner scholar Matt Stewart talks with Nadya Williams about why quiet novels can hit harder than flashy ones and how Crossing to Safety turns friendship, academia, and marriage into real drama. We also ask what makes a classic, how books survive by luck as much as merit, and why long obedience in relationships might be the rarest plot of all.
Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-suppo...
A monastery in the desert preserves the shattered remnants of civilisation after nuclear fire, and the relics include something chilling: the technical knowledge that could destroy the world all over again. That is the dark engine driving Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and it is why this 1959 post-apocalyptic science fiction classic still refuses to go stale.
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 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...
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 Au...
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...
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 genuin...
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. I...
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 sti...
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.
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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.
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Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you wo...
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