Nadya Williams

Nadya Williams is the author of four books, including Christians Reading Classics (2025) and The Literate Soul: What Three Thousand Years of Reading Books Teaches Us About Loving God (2027). She is Books Editor for Mere Orthodoxy, where she also hosts the Christians Reading Classics podcast. She is a Senior Fellow in the Ashbrook Center and the Interim Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. She is also a Contributing Editor to Providence and holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University. You can find her on Twitter @NadyaWilliams81

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Christopher Lasch, Plain Writing, and Democracy

Social critic Christopher Lasch was emphatic that the inability of Americans to express themselves simply and clearly through writing was indicative of major civilizational decline, and the problem has only gotten worse

Optimizing Children is Nothing New

The advent of technologies allowing parents to select embryos with superior genetics is just the latest step down the road to the total commodification of life

“Like a Western Suit that Doesn’t Fit”: Shūsaku Endō, Christianity, and Japan

A newly discovered novella by Shūsaku Endō, author of “Silence,” sheds light on the author’s conflicted personal life

Labor Unions, Roman History, and the Quest for Community

While organized labor may seem to be a distinctively modern phenomenon, recent scholarship points to the historical prevalence of such associations across the ancient Mediterranean, from Rome to Egypt

The Ghettoization of Western Civilization in Universities

As schools like UNC found centers devoted to perspectives other than the left-wing views that dominate universities, the need for such viewpoint diversity is more apparent than ever

The Innocence of Pilate, the Guilt of Humanity

Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” but how much blame does the Roman governor of Judea really deserve?

One Year from October 7th: A Liturgy of Suffering and a Lexicon of Antisemitism

On October 7th, 2024, we remember the latest episodes in the long history of violence against the Jewish people, and the continuing efforts by antisemites to deny their suffering

Freezing Dreams and Selling Lies in Family Unfriendly America

Natalie Lampert’s new book on the rise of egg freezing reveals the family unfriendly culture that increasingly permeates America

Cultural Sanctification in 50 AD and 2024 AD

Christians today are understandably concerned about an increasingly hostile culture, but we should recall the early church’s response to the Roman Empire’s even more hostile culture

A People Without Culture: What the End of Reading Truly Means 

Democracy requires a broadly disseminated literary tradition through which to transmit the culture that sustains a civilization