Mr. Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale, is an accomplished historian of the Protestant Reformation; his 2009 biography of John Calvin ... Lives of Great Religious Books.

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.” ...

Some of these books are now considered ... novels provide a sharper rendering of Western stories and a broader view of the region that has captured the world’s imagination for centuries.

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.” ...