The Scandal of the Christian Imagination

As we wrap up season 1 of Christians Reading Classics, Nadya reflects on the scandal of the Christian imagination and the role of reading classic books in forming a nourished imagination.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, this is Ian. I'm the producer for Christians Reading Classics. Here at Mere Orthodoxy, our mission is to create thoughtful media for the renewal of the church and culture. That includes this podcast, along with other podcasts, daily articles, a print journal, an online community, and more. Mere Orthodoxy and all of our projects are supported by readers and listeners just like you. 2026 is looking like it will be the most exciting year in Mere Orthodoxy's 20-year history. But we need your help to make it happen. If you enjoyed this podcast, want to see it continue, and partner with us to create even more resources like this. You can make that happen by becoming a member. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member to partner with us. That's Mereorthodoxy.com slash member. Let's renew minds and restore hope for the good of the church and the culture. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member today.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a new podcast from Mere Orthodoxy. We just concluded season one, so if you haven't listened to all the episodes yet, I have good news for you. There are 15 excellent conversations about classic books waiting for you, ranging from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man to Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, to Tolkien's The Return of the King, Laura Ingall's Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, Dorothy Sayre's, Flannery O'Connor, and C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. And this is a very incomplete list of the embarrassment of cultural riches waiting for you. But first, before you go back and binge all the excellent episodes from season one, I'd like to tell you a little more about the vision for this podcast and also about my new book from which the podcast gets its name. My name is Nadia Williams, and I'm the books editor for Mere Orthodoxy. I received my BA in classics and French literature from the University of Virginia and my PhD in classics from Princeton University. I was an academic for 15 years before walking away a couple of years ago. Now I homeschool my kids, write, and edit. But academia dragged me back, sort of. I am currently the interim director of the MFA in creative writing at Ashland University, meaning I direct a program that trains writers for the good of our world, because good writing is a project of civilizational importance. We need good books. And if you're an aspiring writer of any sort, by the way, I'd love to connect. And as part of all of these responsibilities, I read a lot of books on my own and with my family. But let's face it, if I weren't writing and editing, I'd still be reading because it's fun. I think a lot about what books do to us as persons made in God's image, as believers, as friends, as neighbors, as citizens of this country and of God's kingdom. To read is just not a passive activity, after all. Reading shapes our imagination. The books we read shape our souls and our affections. Reading well as Christians is what this podcast is all about. And that is the goal of my new book, Christians Reading Classics, coming in November from Zanja Van Academic. Now, in introducing this podcast back in the summer, I said, 31 years ago, historian Mark Noel declared that there's a scandal of the evangelical mind. The scandal, Noel said, was that there wasn't much of an evangelical mind. But right now, I said, it seems that we're living also in another related scandal, and that is the scandal of the Christian imagination. It seems that there isn't much of one. Now, this podcast directly responds to this problem. It starts from a simple premise. Reading older books is vital for cultivating a flourishing, healthy Christian imagination. And in our first season of 15 episodes, we did just that. We talked about really good older books. So in the process, we covered 15 books with a major anniversary this year. So that was our theme: books with an anniversary. We started with J.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and concluded with T.S. Elliott's The Hollow Man, both published in 1925. Along the way, we also discussed Winnie the Pooh, Tolkien's The Return of the King, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and even the Nicene Creed, which is 1700 years young this year. It was glorious. So who is this podcast for? And who is my book for? Put simply, they're for every Christian who would like to cultivate a healthier imagination. Whether you are a believer in the pews or a pastor, a theology student or a truck driver, a plumber or a chef, a homeschool mom like me, or a lawyer, an academic, or an elementary school teacher, or a nurse or high school student, or even my elementary and middle school aged kids. This podcast is for homeschooling families, for you and your friends who would like to start a book club, for anyone who has a long work commute or a road trip and needs something good to listen to. This is also a podcast for moms who need something calming to listen to while nursing that baby at 2 a.m. Really, I would love for this to be the space for everyone who thinks old books can be rather fun and would like to learn more about how to read something like The Odyssey or Alice in Wonderland or Tocqueville as a Christian. All of the books covered in season one of this podcast were somewhat older books, but most were from the 19th and 20th century. It made sense to center this first season around so many classics people may have heard of. But the title of this podcast, again, is from my new book, Christians Reading Classics. And in my book, the focus is on much older classics, the Greco-Roman ones. The most recent book I consider is Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy from the early 5th century AD. And I ask this question: Can Christians today read the great classics of Greco-Roman pagan literature for spiritual formation and growth in the virtues? My answer is yes. But reading the classics this way requires reading differently than perhaps most of us are used to doing. And so my book is about reading the Greco-Roman classics as Christians, the why, the how, and to a lesser extent, the when. The past few books, the past few years, have seen the appearance of several excellent books on the value of literature in nourishing our minds and souls, meaning developing the practice of reading not only the Bible, but also everything else we read for spiritual formation. Most of these books, though, have focused largely on medieval and modern literature, involving antiquity only briefly. But I'm a classicist. And almost 2,000 years ago, as Christianity was just first beginning to spread in the ancient Mediterranean world, the gospel came to believers who had grown up hearing and reading the great works of pagan literature, seeing the pagan gods everywhere around in their world, saturated as it was, with pagan gods and literature, public and private art, coins and so on. The joy when they first encountered Jesus and learned of his love for all sinful humanity stood out so starkly against the cruelty of the pagan worldview that we see in the myths. And yet these believers could see hints of truth and spiritual longing for salvation in those myths. And so, in each of the twenty short chapters in my book, I introduce the readers to one or two different ancient authors and their key works. And I argue for three connected reasons for Christians today to read even the pagan classics for spiritual formation. First, we should read, like C. S. Lewis once did, to be surprised by joy. Second, we should read these classics to better understand the world of the Bible and the earliest Christians. And third, we should read them for character formation. I suppose there's an implied, kind of assumed, fourth one, we should read them because they're fun. But I also tell you a bit about how to read them because some of these books are unfamiliar and are more difficult to approach than something written today. So I invite you to join me in learning to appreciate the greatest works of Greco Roman literature and learning to read them as Christians. And whether you read the book or not, I invite you to join us again in February when this podcast comes back with a very exciting season two.