Interview with Nadya Williams, author of “Christians Reading Classics”

Nadya Williams is a classicist, historian, and author, as well as the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy and the interim director of the MFA at Ashland University. She is the author of multiple books, most recently Christians Reading Classics: An Introduction to Greco-Roman Classics from Homer to Boethius (Zondervan, 2025). It’s not too late to order that new book for Christmas.

Your new book is called Christians Reading Classics: An Introduction to Greco-Roman Classics from Homer to Boethius. The title kind of explains it, but how do you describe the book to people who haven’t heard of it yet?

My book is a manifesto of sorts: Christians should read the Greco-Roman classics! As people whose faith story is rooted in events that happened two-thousand years ago, we need to read the ancient classics. Except, I’ve met so many people who have an almost irrational fear of old things—that somehow anything ancient wouldn’t be nearly as accessible as something recent. There’s a reason we have expressions like “it’s all Greek to me” in our parlance. In response to these dilemmas, my book is a how-to-read-Classics guide with training wheels. I walk Christians through the most famous works of Greco-Roman literature and show how to read them as Christians for character formation, growth in the virtues, and to be surprised anew by joy in the gospel.

What is your goal for the book? What do you hope it accomplishes in the world?

I have several inter-connected goals, all of which involve finding joy in reading these texts. I want Christians who might never have read the classics much to discover for themselves the beauty of Greco-Roman literature! I think this delight in reading the classics would also help Christians understand better the world of the early church, reading the literature that some of the earliest believers were familiar with. And I think this would, in turn, help Christians find greater enjoyment in reading the Bible—which includes so many genres of ancient literature that often seem rather foreign to modern readers.  

A related side goal in my book is to show Christians how to read literature as Christians. We should be thinking not only about what we read but how we read it.

Are there aspects of Christianity that you think people will fail to understand or appreciate if they do not have some understanding, or a good understanding, of the classical world?

I worry sometimes that modern believers have lost the ability to see just how revolutionary and beautiful the gospel is, because it doesn’t seem so earth-shattering to us in modern US. Most converts to Christianity today (myself included) come to Christ not out of another religion but out of atheism or agnosticism. I grew up in a secular Jewish household, so this was very much the case for me. True, for any convert, there is a sense of wonder in discovering God. But I think the earliest converts, who lived in the Roman Empire and were immersed in the classical world, which was filled with cruel gods who toyed with humans for their own whims and purposes, had an overwhelming sense of awe when they first encountered Jesus. I would like for us to feel that same level of knee-bending and full-body-shaking awe. One way to get there is to read someone like Sophocles—and then imagine what it would have been like for a reader of Homer and Sophocles and Vergil to first meet Christ and hear the unconditional welcome and love.

Your book involves “Greco-Roman Classics.” The Classics have a certain coherence as a category. Did you feel that the texts to write about were essentially picked for you based on the category or did you feel that you had a fair amount of choice in the selection of texts?

There are definitely a lot of conversations about the canon among academic classicists. In fact, every PhD program in Classics has a required reading list of the classics that everyone must read before taking comps. But within the canon, there is still some degree of variation—which is why if you look at different PhD programs’ lists, they’re not 100% identical, although they may be 75% identical.

I knew I wanted to structure the book’s argument into 20 short chapters, split roughly equally between Greek and Roman literature and going chronologically but also according to the five general themes I selected. So then within these somewhat artificial parameters, I did some thinking about the canon. There was no way I could have written this book without having a chapter on Homer or Vergil, for instance. But there were some authors who are in the canon and whom someone else maybe would have included but I didn’t—like Xenophon or Plautus or Lucretius or Horace. Of course, someone else who might have included these authors would have left out some of the ones I included. Finitude is a problem in every aspect of our human lives, including the books we write!

As you can gather from this, my approach isn’t exactly scientific. But the overall point of my project stands: by selecting texts from major genres and along key themes, I hope I’m providing readers with sufficient orientation to be able to pick up and read other texts from those same genres.

“The Classics” seem pretty hot right now in some ways. Everyone knows someone doing “Classical Conversations” with their children and there are countless “classical” schools popping up around the country. But there seems to be a lot of variation out there in style and in quality. What do you think a school or a program really needs to be considered classical? What are ways that programs fall short of their full potential?

This variation in quality is something that drives me absolutely crazy. I’m sorry, but in my view, you cannot say that your school or program is “classical” if there is no Latin (and ideally Greek) offered, or if the languages are taught so poorly that no one actually learns anything (a very common problem). Likewise, there is often lacking a clear integration of the disciplines that is the hallmark of a truly classical education. When I think of classical education at its best, I think of the medieval university: imagine a circle with theology in the middle and all the other disciplines connecting to it. Education of this sort equips students not only in the different disciplines (which any school tries to do) but shows why the study of all these disciplines is connected and vital for understand the beauty of God and the world He has made. This is the original interdisciplinary thinking!

A friend here at Ashland University, Joe Griffith (a scholar of parental rights in education), is currently building a new Classical Education program here, preparing students to teach in classical schools. My kids recently got to participate as demo students in a sample class that one of his students taught as a final project this semester for a methods course. This student-teacher presented a survey of the four seasons, designed for elementary-aged kids, bringing together art, music, and poetry—while also discussing basic natural science observations. That’s the sort of thing that should be happening in classical schools—and it does happen in the best ones. When you see it, it’s beautiful and it is so joyful for the students!

And perhaps programs like this one that train future teachers to approach everything in the school thoughtfully and intentionally will be the best solution to the current “Wild West” in classical education.

How did you decide to pursue a PhD in Classics? Most people don’t get PhDs, much less in Classics. What is your academic origin story?

I first became obsessed with all things Greek and Roman after coming across a mythology book at home when I was in early elementary school. And then, when my family first moved to the US, I was beginning 10th grade, and my high school had Latin! I had the most incredible teacher who told me at the end of the school year that I could take the Latin textbook home for the summer. So I finished the textbook that summer. It was fun! When school resumed in the fall and the teacher found out I had finished the textbook, she was rather shocked: it turned out that textbook was used for all levels of Latin up until AP. So there I was, taking AP Vergil in my second year of Latin. I was hooked at that point—I declared my Classics major the day before my first year of college began, and I knew by that time that I wanted to get a Ph.D. in Classics.  

I’m now using that same introductory Latin textbook I learned from (Jenney’s Latin) to teach my own kids. We’ve come full circle!

One of my favorite writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, memorized a lot of Greek and Latin poetry and texts and often recited it to himself. He wrote that Horace’s Odes are always good for improving one’s mood. Do you have classical texts that you have memorized or that you return to for some non-academic reason?

Everyone should memorize some poetry, and if they can do it in another language (especially Greek and Latin), they should! Generally, poetry is much easier to memorize than prose, so I do, in fact, have several bits of Greek and Latin poetry memorized—the introductory portions of Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid; one soliloquy from Euripides’ Medea, part of the “Ode to Man chorus” from Sophocles’ Antigone. At one point I had much of Cicero’s First Catilinarian oration memorized, but it just didn’t stick as well (the prose problem).

The beauty of memorizing something is that it really does continue to live rent free in our heads! These are words of comfort, delight, joy, and any conceivable occasion. I find myself sometimes reciting a poem in my head while doing something stressful—for instance, I have a horrible, irrational fear of needles, so anytime I get a flu shot or get blood drawn, I have to close my eyes and recite something in my mind. Just a small example of how beautiful poetry helps us live flourishing lives!

The Founding Fathers were big fans of the classical period. How might more interest in the classical period improve our understanding of the American past and/or improve present-day politics?

There are whole books on this topic by specialists, so I’ll just mention just one fairly obvious thing. I don’t know how someone might understand the Founding Fathers without reading a lot of Greco-Roman classics first—people like Jefferson are just so casual at dropping references and remarks; you can see this was simply part of their everyday language, frame of thought. Reading the Federalist essays, for instance, you’re going to miss a lot if you miss the classical references.

A better understanding of classical history and culture would help us today understand better the ideas of the Founding Fathers behind the American experiment. It is safe to say that our government would not look the way it does if people like Jefferson were not thoroughly obsessed with the Greeks and Romans. Of course, what we have is also very thoroughly American—but the two have become intertwined in this country in really fascinating ways that are deserving of attention in their own right. But I do think you have to begin with reading the classics the Founding Fathers read and that shaped their thinking.

You’ve written a number of books and right now you’re the interim director of the MFA at Ashland University. How has that changed your perspective on writing? Are there things you see or do differently now?

I’ve written earlier this year about “Why We Must Fight the Demise of the Essay,” especially in the age of AI. But at the time when I wrote this, I was thinking this was advice for other people. Except, now that I’m directing an MFA program, it’s advice for me, too! It’s not so much that this new role has changed my perspective on writing, but that it has made me more bullish about coming up with solutions.

Creative writers coming into an MFA program today are living in a world that is increasingly anti-human and anti-human creativity. I see my job as empowering writers to be fully human and fully engaged in their work and their world. I keep emphasizing to them the importance of reading a lot—and reading older books—for growing as writers.