Christians Reading Classics

58 Episodes

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Edgar Allan Poe: America's Spookiest Classic with Fr. Ryan Duns and Steven Knepper

2026-10-2901:07:08

Poe doesn’t just write about ravens, floorboards, and crumbling mansions. He writes about what happens when the mind starts feeding on itself and you can’t tell whether the horror is out there, in here, or both. Steve Knepper and Father Ryan Dunn join to discuss three essential Edgar Allan Poe classics: “The Raven,” “The Telltale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and we ask what it looks like to take spooky literature seriously as Christians. Christians Reading Classics is a podca...

Moby-Dick, with Kyle Harper

2026-10-2259:43

Moby-Dick is a whale hunt on the surface, but underneath it’s a confrontation with a world that won’t fully make sense. Kyle Harper, a historian of whales and the wider animal world, joins us to argue for Herman Melville’s masterpiece as the great American novel and to pin down what we really mean when we call something a “classic.” Kyle explains why timeless books survive changing tastes: they keep asking the fundamental questions about truth, God, knowledge, and what it means to be human.&n...

All Quiet on the Western Front, with Jason Barnhart

2026-10-1556:38

A single sentence can hold an entire war: “All quiet on the Western Front.” That understatement is exactly why Erich Maria Remarque’s novel still haunts readers almost a century later, and why we wanted to slow down and read it carefully rather than treat it like a history lesson. Today we are joined by Jason Barnhart, a peace theologian and professor of historical theology, to talk through the transparency, humanity, and paradoxes that make All Quiet on the Western Front a true classic...

Billy Budd, with Christine Norvell

2026-10-0853:34

A beautiful story can still be brutal, and Billy Budd proves it. Christine Norvell, author of The Sycamore Fig Tree, joins to discuss Melville’s unforgettable portrait of a sailor who seems almost made for admiration—which makes his tragedy that much more thought-provoking. 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. Listen and read T...

Aristotle, with Philip Freeman

2026-10-0146:42

Aristotle is everywhere in Western civilization, but most of us meet him as a difficult assignment instead of a real human being with a complicated story. We sit down with classicist and biographer Philip Freeman, author of Aristotle: The First Teacher, to follow Aristotle from an out-of-the-way town in northern Greece to the intellectual pressure cooker of Plato’s Academy and then into his own ambitious project at the Lyceum. Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and i...

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