Christians Reading Classics

Latest Episodes:

The Journals of Lewis and Clark with Craig Fehrman Jun 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Augustine's Confessions with Joey Sherrard May 28, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Cassiodorus and Classical Education with Joseph Griffith and Joshua Kinlaw May 21, 2026

Show notes

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 about what makes a book a classic, why classical education keeps resurfacing, and how the trivium and quadrivium were shaped in late antiquity.

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Petrarch's Canzoniere with A. M. Juster May 14, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Chapters
0:13 - Introduction to Petrarch's Canzoniere.
0:42 - Discussion on the arc of the story.
1:26 - Overview of Petrarch's themes.
2:23 - Introduction of Petrarch's work.
2:51 - Introduction of Mike Jester.
4:31 - Definition of a Classic.
5:42 - Petrarch's influence on European poetry.
6:41 - Challenges in translating Petrarch.
9:39 - Mike's journey with Petrarch.
15:16 - Mike's personal journey with poetry.
22:51 - Discussion on translation and Latin.
27:14 - Petrarch's confessional poetry.
30:15 - Importance of poetry for Christians.
33:13 - Spiritual aspect of poetry.
40:39 - Translating challenging poems.
46:40 - Upcoming Propersious collection.
53:23 - Final question about classic literature.

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The Great Gatsby with Katy Carl May 07, 2026

Show notes

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 writing classics now. With Nadya Williams and novelist Katy Carl, editor of Word on Fire's literary imprint, Luminor.

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Great American Sermons with John Wilsey and Daniel K. Williams [FULL EPISODE] May 01, 2026

Show notes

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 with charity, and on John Wilsey's new book, God and Country. With host Nadya Williams, John Wilsey (SBTS), and Daniel Williams (Ashland University).

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Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv (or M.Div., your choice) and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship.: https://bit.ly/OurRisenLord

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Chapters

00:00 - Reading Winthrop
02:12 - Welcome and Introductions
04:11 - Why Read Classic Sermons?
06:54 - Winthrop and the Puritan Errand
12:12 - City on a Hill: Promise and Warning
16:37 - Edwards and the Great Awakening
25:18 - Reading the Room in 1741
35:40 - Lincoln's Second Inaugural
43:31 - The Passive Voice and Providence
46:33 - King's Mountaintop Sermon
55:27 - Loving Our Historical Neighbors
1:03:06 - Why History Is Who We Are

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Thomas Aquinas For Protestants with Miles Smith Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

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 certain books (the Summa, Willa Cather's My Ántonia, Lewis's Till We Have Faces) break us open while others simply don't.

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Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv (or M.Div., your choice) and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship.: https://bit.ly/OurRisenLord

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00:00 - Aquinas's Prologue and Welcome
02:18 - Introducing Miles Smith IV
03:11 - What Makes a Classic?
04:18 - Reading Aquinas as a Protestant
08:34 - The Social Media Debate Behind This Episode
09:26 - Who Was Thomas Aquinas?
11:46 - Reason, Revelation, and What Evangelicals Already Assume
12:47 - The Aristotle Question
15:20 - Virtue, Flourishing, and the Knowledge of God
18:04 - How to Begin Reading the Summa
20:52 - The Socratic Method and Aquinas's Contemporaries
24:25 - The Summa, Dante, and the Black Death
29:02 - Theology, Philosophy, and Devotion
31:03 - Books That Break Us (and Till We Have Faces)
33:10 - The Classic Miles Wishes He Had Written

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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne with Jeff Bilbro | American 250 Apr 16, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Get the free ebook Spiritual Formation for the Family at http://mereorthodoxy.com/family.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv (or M.Div., your choice) and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship.: https://bit.ly/OurRisenLord

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00:00 - Introduction & What Is a Classic?
05:10 - American Classics & the Year 250
07:15 - Short Books vs. Long Books
09:33 - Hawthorne: Life & Context
14:11 - The Plot: Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Pearl
17:23 - Three Responses to Sin
25:08 - Dimmesdale & Self-Deception
29:10 - Pearl & Spiritual Formation
33:43 - Chillingworth: Truth-Hunting for Power
36:17 - What Christians Should Notice
42:16 - Creaturely Intelligence (Jeff's Forthcoming Book)
47:31 - What Classic Would You Have Written?

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Ivana Greco and Dixie Dillon Lane Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

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 year of America 250?

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Apply for Beeson Divinity School's Ph.D program by April 1 for Fall 2026 admission here: https://bit.ly/BeesonDivinityPhD

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Chapter

00:00 - Introduction & what makes an American classic
03:00 - Favorite American classics for children
04:15 - Can you hate a classic? What parents look for
06:52 - Books build culture
08:45 - How parenting changes reading habits
11:58 - Entering Tom Sawyer: the world of the novel
13:51 - Tom's misadventures (and Ivana's canoe confession)
18:06 - The cast of characters: Tom, Huck, Becky, Aunt Polly
24:12 - Reading Tom Sawyer historically: slavery, race, and context
26:50 - Who is really raising Tom Sawyer?
31:16 - What would you do if you were raising Tom?
34:51 - Tom, women, and the civilizing impulse
38:44 - How a book about mischief became a great American novel

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Moby Dick by Herman Melville with Christina Bieber Lake Apr 02, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Get the free ebook Spiritual Formation for the Family by going to http://mereorthodoxy.com/family.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv (or M.Div., your choice) and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship: https://bit.ly/OurRisenLord

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00:00 - Introduction & Opening Reading
01:58 - Christina Bieber Lake's Background
05:17 - What Makes a Classic?
10:01 - Why Americans Should Read Moby Dick
14:02 - Melville: Who He Was and What He Believed
18:08 - Approaching a 625-Page Novel
21:54 - Plot, Characters, and the Ship's Crew
25:51 - The Doubloon Chapter: Melville's Theme of Reading
28:39 - Humor in Moby Dick
31:50 - The Cetology Chapters and Language
34:43 - Ahab, Job, and the Desire for Control
36:00 - Ishmael as Survivor and Narrator
39:39 - The Masculinity of the Novel
49:01 - Reception and Why It Flopped
50:15 - Long Books and the Muscle of Attention
54:30 - Closing Question: A Classic You Wish You'd Written

Listen and read The Daily Liturgy by going to http://mereorthodoxy.com/daily-liturgy

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