Mr. Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale, is an accomplished historian of the Protestant Reformation; his 2009 biography of John Calvin is the finest modern life of the reformer.

If we relocate the debate to America, the legacy of our current great books list goes back to the 20th century. In 1919, John Erskine ... “Great Books of the Western World.” ...

“On this day, with the setting sun, the brightest light in the world and he who had been the strength of the Church was taken back to heaven.” So wrote Theodore Beza of the passing of John ...

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn . Born in Kansas in 1945, Dunn was the daughter of migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers. Her family of five siblings roved throughout the American West before ...

The Great Books of the Western World is a 60-volume series of books published by Encyclopedia Britannica that includes canonical Western works like “The Iliad” and “The Oddessy.” ...