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About the author
Nadya Williams received her Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University and is a military historian of the Greco-Roman world. After fifteen years as a Professor of Ancient History and Classics, she left academia to focus on homeschooling her children and writing for the church. She is the author of
Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023),
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic (IVP Academic, 2024),
Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan Academic, 2025), and the co-editor (with Nicola Foote) of
Civilians and Warfare in World History (Routledge, 2017).
She is books editor for
Mere Orthodoxy. She is also a regular contributor to
Christianity Today, contributing editor for
Providence Magazine and
Front Porch Republic, and featured author at
Fairer Disputations. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in
Current,
Plough,
Law and Liberty,
Religion and Liberty,
The Dispatch,
The Gospel Coalition,
Comment,
Common Good Magazine, and more.
Summary
Can Christians today read the great classics of Greco-Roman pagan literature for spiritual formation and growth in the virtues?
Classical scholar Nadya Williams responds with an unequivocal "Yes!" Even in the Late Roman Empire Christian readers, like Augustine and Boethius, did just this. But reading the classics this way requires reading differently than, perhaps, most people today are used to doing.
This is a book about reading the Greco-Roman classics as Christians--the why, the how, and to a lesser extent, the when. This exercise, equal parts intellectual and spiritual, is timely. Just as our bodies are what we eat, so are our minds what we consume. The past few years have seen the appearance of books on the value of literature in nourishing our minds and souls--developing the practice of reading not just the Bible but all that we read for spiritual formation. Most such books have focused largely on medieval and modern literature, involving antiquity only occasionally.
Almost two thousand years ago, as Christianity was 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 and seeing the pagan gods everywhere around in their world, saturated as it was with pagan gods in literature, public and private art, coins, and more. The joy in encountering Jesus and learning of his love for all sinful humanity, stood out particularly starkly against the cruelty of the pagan worldview that comes through so clearly in the myths. And yet, they too could see hints of truth and spiritual longings for salvation in those myths.
In twenty short chapters, Nadya Williams introduces the readers to one or two different ancient authors and their key works. She offers 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.
It is time Christians rediscovered the benefits of reading the great works of Greco-Roman classical literature as Christians.
