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.

The great books should be, as Adler claimed so many years ago, those works that are timeless, ask enduring questions, and inspire, by their sheer magnificence, awe in their readers.

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 late novelist’s final books are ambitious portraits of the Western world and the human soul. In the Middle Ages, there was a popular group of texts that made up the so-called contemptus ...

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.” ...