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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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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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.

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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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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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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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.

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

—

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

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

—

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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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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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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

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

—

• 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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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.

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

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

—

• 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?

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

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

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://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships