I mentioned in a post yesterday that I am teaching a course at Patrick Henry College called “Major Christian Authors.” Some of you asked about my reading list. Here it is:
(1) Dante’s Paradiso
(2) Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I “Holiness”
(3) George Herbert, The Temple
(4) John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
(5) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Complete Poems
(6) G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
(7) T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets and other poems
(8) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
(9) Charles Williams, The Descent into Hell
(10) Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
(11) Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
Our students, thanks to our classical liberal arts core curriculum, have already read Dante’s Inferno, and other Lewis books. Likewise, obvious major Christian authors and their works who are missing from this list–such as Augustine’s Confessions, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pascal’s Pensees, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment–are also in the core.
I’m open to rotating some of the books we study when I offer it again, if you have any suggestions.
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