A single sentence can reorder a civilization, and “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is one of those sentences. Nadya Williams sits down with historian Dr Brad Birzer to read the Declaration of Independence closely and ask why it still sends a jolt through American politics, moral imagination, and public life 250 years later.

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

The Declaration of Independence is only a few paragraphs long, but it tries to do something enormous: justify a political break while teaching a moral vision of human equality, liberty, and rightful government. Nadya Williams and Jake Meador sit down with Dr Matthew Spaulding of Hillsdale College, a leading scholar of the Declaration and author of The Making of the American Mind, to read the document as an American classic that still forms our public arguments and our private conscience.

—

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.

Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026

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 to love someone well — and what does it cost when that love curls inward? Nadya Williams and Oliver Traldi discuss C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, tracing how Lewis reframes the myth of Cupid and Psyche to expose the jealousy beneath even the most devoted love, the limits of philosophy before the divine, and what it means to render an account of your own life.

—

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.

Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026

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

Steinbeck's East of Eden returns the Cain and Abel story twice over, tracing original sin, mimetic desire, and the fragile hope encoded in timshel across the arc of early American history. Philip Bunn and Matthew H. Young join host Nadya Williams to read Steinbeck as political theorist, moral cartographer, and reluctant humanist.

—

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.

Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026

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

James Fenimore Cooper gets filed away as “important” long before many of us actually read him, and that gap is the problem we wanted to solve. I’m joined by Dr. Wayne Franklin, one of the leading Cooper scholars and the author of major biographies of Cooper, to talk about what makes a classic live past its own pages. His definition sticks with me: a classic is a book that, once you start it, you realize you already know, because it has permeated the culture and taught later writers what stories can look like.

-

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.

Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026

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

We treat the Lewis and Clark journals as a true American classic, reading them for voice, humour, and human detail rather than just as a schoolbook summary. With historian Craig Furman, we follow the expedition through science, hardship, Native diplomacy, and the moral complexity that the journals preserve in plain sight.

—

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.

Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026

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

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.

—

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