Nadya Williams, a former Anxious Bencher who is currently a books editor at Mere Orthodoxy (and who is also my wife), has just published her third book: Christians Reading Classics, which Zondervan released on November 11.
In this piece, I talk with her about her reasons for writing a book that combines her love for the classics with her passion for Christian reflection and edifying the church.
DKW: Why did you decide to write Christians Reading Classics? What do you hope it will accomplish?
NW: As you know, I really love the Greco-Roman classics. And we’re living right now in the midst of a Classical Christian education boom. And yet, I’ve noticed that while many Christians really are excited about reading the Great Books, the Greco-Roman classics tend to get less attention among people in the pews or even in a lot of Classical Christian schools. And most CCCU’s don’t have Classics departments. On the one hand, I get it: this world is filled with books, including really good ones and we can’t read them all (cf. John 21:25). But also, I do think the ancient classics have something special to offer Christians today, and I wrote this book to help Christians find it–yes, you can read the ancient classics as a Christian and it will delight you and will enrich your faith.
I’m thinking of this book as training wheels for the proverbial bike. Reading the Greco-Roman classics is a different sort of experience than reading contemporary novels or stories. Reading the classics requires a little bit more intellectual work from the reader. Plus, there is the cultural distance–which, by the way, is why so many people find reading the Bible a bit challenging too. So each chapter in my book gives historical, literary, and theological orientation to a particular author or genre, allowing a reader who might not have read these classics before to get a taste and then be able to jump in with more confidence. This makes the book well-suited for Classical Christian school students and teachers, and also college students, seminarians, and hopefully just Christians in the pews who have been thinking they should read more classics!
DKW: Why should Christians read the classics? In what way do you think reading the classics will help Christians better understand God and the world around them?
NW: I say in the book that I have “three interrelated reasons for Christians today to read the pagan classics for spiritual formation: reading to be surprised by joy, reading to understand the world of the Bible and the earliest Christians, and reading for character formation.” I think the second of this is really geared towards helping Christians better understand God and the world around them through, in a way, trying to read some of the texts the earliest converts read. Just imagine: as a first-century AD Roman who had lived around the stories of the pagan gods all your life, how intensely emotional would it have been to hear about God’s love for you?
For many Christians today, especially those who grew up in church, the gospel has in some ways lost its wonder–and they may not even realize it. We forget just how extraordinary and beautiful and awe-inspiring it is that the same God who made the world and everyone (and everything) in it loves us and has died for us. But the earliest converts who came to Christ after reading the stories of these other gods got it. And yet, I argue, we can see glimpses of the gospel and the yearning for the transcendent in the pagan writers too. Everyone really did have a God-shaped void.
But in addition to that, I think reading the Greco-Roman classics will help Christians with their Bible reading. These classics are from various genres of literature that exist in the Bible as well, and the Bible also has references to themes that were common in ancient literature–because the original audiences knew these. This was their world! So Christians today will gain a better understanding of that cultural world, but also will see just how striking the Christian message was in response.
DKW: You started reading the classics at a young age. What drew you to great literature – and to ancient Greek and Roman literature, in particular?
NW: I was an early reader and an avid one. I just loved adventure stories–I devoured all these novels by Dumas, Jules Verne, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many more. So when I first came across a book of Greek and Roman myths and literary summaries and adaptations, it really did open up to me this amazing world of adventures, and I fell in love with it. I could tell that these stories were rich, much more so than what I could understand as a kid reading them, and yet they really absorbed me. And the distance of time just added to the incredible mystique of these stories–as did the idea of rogue gods populating them.
Years later, reading C.S. Lewis’s spiritual memoir, Surprised by Joy, I could relate to his own experience of growing up as this bookish kid who loved the classics and all these strange myths. Another commonality is that, I think, God used our respective love for ancient and medieval literature to bring us to Himself. I am convinced that this is true for all of us, by the way: God works through our interests, who we are, to reach us.
DKW: You read nearly all of the Greek and Roman classics before you were a Christian. In what way did your understanding of the classics change after you became a believer in Christ? Do you think that there is a uniquely Christian way to understand the classics – and if so, what is it?
NW: I think, like Lewis, I found that the Greco-Roman classics made more sense than ever before after I came to Christ. The Greco-Roman epics, for instance, are obsessed with glory as a sort of immortality. It all seems so selfish and myopic (my students have often noted how “whiny” Achilles seems), but it’s also deeply relatable, since we all want to “win” in any contest. But only after coming to Christ could I understand that there is something deeper afoot here about human nature that reflects our nature as made in God’s image. We all have eternal souls–longing for an eternity with God.
A uniquely Christian way to understand the classics–and, really, all literature–begins with seeking to know God and with remembering that we are His creations. When we read the Bible, we do ask: what does a given passage teach us about God and about us? And these are actually not bad questions to consider even in reading the pagan classics. What we see become apparent, in the process, is a millennia-old longing of different peoples and writers for something that they couldn’t articulate, but they knew that there really was something important they were missing. Just consider the longings and questions that Gilgamesh has in the Epic of Gilgamesh: he is questing for immortality, but he is really wondering what the meaning of life really is. He has achieved so much as a hero, but what is it all for? He knows he is missing something greater, but just doesn’t know what it is. And he’s just one of many other characters and authors who is asking these deep questions that, ultimately, we see fulfilled in Christ. Once you see it across ancient literature, you can’t unsee it.
DKW: You are currently completing a book project on Christian bibliophilia, which means that much of your current writing is now focused on how Christians should read great books. Why do we need books about how to read great books? What do you hope your writing on this topic (including Christians Reading Classics, as well as some of your other work) will accomplish?
NW: I think we need books about reading great books for the same reason that theologians find books of systematic theology helpful. We need systems of thought that help us bring together productively ideas and concepts that otherwise dwell in separate storage boxes in the recesses of our brains. But also, I’m seeing more and more, the longer I work on such projects on reading well as Christians, that all reading can be deeply spiritual. It is no coincidence that God spoke to us in a book–and in stories. The act of reading good books and also listening to beautiful stories both work powerfully in our brains, secular science shows.
In fact, to be more specific, the science shows that any reading and any stories work powerfully in our brains–which is why I want to encourage Christians to be picky and make judgments on books. Read books that are good, true, and beautiful! But overall, I want to encourage Christians to continue to be people of the Book—and also people of books–at this precarious time when various catastrophizing headlines document the decline of reading in schools and among adults. Add the rise of AI, social media, and the decline of attention spans, and we can see how reading is becoming endangered even among Christians. Continuing to read well–both the Bible and great books, including ancient classics–is good for us in ways that are distinctly premodern. And this is the kind of good that has civilizational significance, as I’ve repeatedly argued elsewhere–the decline of reading has grim civilizational repercussions, but also fostering a culture of reading for Christians is good for our society as a whole. And it all begins with books at home.
DKW: Your book Christians Reading Classics blurs the traditional boundaries between historical study, the study of literature, and Christian reflection and exhortation. How do you see the relationship between these different disciplines – and how do you bring them together in your work?
NW: I think the traditional boundaries are not so traditional–they’re very recent and are the fruit of (secular) modern research universities from the 19th-century on, where experts had to specialize more narrowly and stick to their lane. If you’re a historian, you just write history; if you’re a literary scholar, then it’s only literature for you, etc. But classics as an academic discipline has always been a bit more interdisciplinary–although most academic classicists do specialize in, say, a literary genre or a historical period. But in any case, I find that the most helpful things I can say to Christians right now come from blurring these disciplinary boundaries, and in a way, this is an approach that goes back to writers in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is what Augustine and Boethius were doing, for example! For Christians, if we think of everything we write as refracted through theology–as the Medieval universities did–we can fruitfully think about God’s place in our study of anything and everything.
To be clear, I do think there is value to academic specialist research–and I rely on this research in my own books. But the writing I am doing is for the people in the pews. I am not seeking to advance the study of a particular academic topic. I am seeking to advance God’s kingdom here on earth.
DKW: What are some of your current projects? What ideas interest you, and where do you see your writing going in the future?
NW: I am fascinated with what it means for every Christian to live out the calling to love God with all our mind. And for obvious reasons, I am particularly interested in figuring out how to do this well as a homeschool mom–an activity most people don’t readily acknowledge as obviously intellectual, but I would argue that it very much is!
And so, once I turn in the Christian bibliophilia project (which is coming from Brazos Press in early 2027), I will turn to the next book project that is under contract–a book on women’s intellectual lives for Zondervan Reflective. The working title is The Pink Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (and I’ve written in brief about this idea for Christianity Today). My essential argument is: we’ve lost the plot in talking about women’s intellectual lives only in specific obviously intellectual professions–such as academics and pastors. But the Bible and the history of the church are filled with beautiful stories of women living lives of the mind in any and all life stages and circumstances. Consider, for instance, the Proverbs 31 wife–she is very obviously an intellectual for the glory of God and for the flourishing of her family.
In all of my writing, I want to show that ideas matter because they shape our world–but most of all, they matter because God calls us to love Him with all our mind too.
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