Christians Reading Classics
Episodes
44 episodes
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky with Maria Baer
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 pu...
Jack London: An American Classic with Elizabeth Stice
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 Declaration of Independence and the Classics with Brad Birzer
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 s...
The Declaration of Independence with Matthew Spalding and Jake Meador
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 si...
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis with Oliver Traldi
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...
East of Eden with Philip Bunn & Matthew H. Young
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...
James Fenimore Cooper with Dr. Wayne Franklin
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 biograph...
The Journals of Lewis and Clark with Craig Fehrman
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...
Augustine's Confessions with Joey Sherrard
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 rem...
Cassiodorus and Classical Education with Joseph Griffith and Joshua Kinlaw
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...
Petrarch's Canzoniere with A. M. Juster
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 translatio...
The Great Gatsby with Katy Carl
A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby still demands more of readers than its first audience was prepared to give. This conversation explores wh...
Great American Sermons with John Wilsey and Daniel K. Williams [FULL EPISODE]
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 Kin...
Thomas Aquinas For Protestants with Miles Smith
Can a Protestant read Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae without converting to Catholicism? Nadya Williams welcomes Miles Smith IV (Hillsdale College) to ta...
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne with Jeff Bilbro | American 250
Nadya Williams and Jeff Bilbro discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter — its Puritan setting, Hawthorne's fraught ancestry, and the novel's three ...
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Ivana Greco and Dixie Dillon Lane
Moby Dick by Herman Melville with Christina Bieber Lake
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...
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand with David Kee
Nadya Williams and David Kee discuss Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged — its origins, philosophy, and enduring relevance for American Christians. Kee, a business p...
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen with Beatrice Scudeler
Jane Austen's most underrated novel is also her most serious. In this conversation, books editor Nadya Williams and essayist Beatrice Scudeler explore what Mansfiel...
The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle with Sabrina Little | America 250
Wuthering Heights with Evie Solheim
Nadya Williams and Evie Solheim discuss Wuthering Heights, what makes it a gothic classic, why Emily Brontë's moral ambiguity still provokes, how the novel speaks to a generation starved for romance, and why the new film adaptation tra...
Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe with Obbie Tyler Todd | America 250
Nadya Williams and Obbie Tyler Todd explore Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as part of season two's focus on classics American Christians should ...
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley with Katelyn Walls Shelton | America 250
Nadya Williams and Katelyn Walls Shelton discuss Aldous Huxley's Brave New World — its haunting parallels to embryo selection, reproductive biotechnology, and pleasure-maximizing culture — and what Christians should make of a novel tha...
