On Creating a “Great Books” Reading Club

11 April 2026

Last week, a lady who will be a future parishioner of mine asked me if I miss being in academia. (Previous to becoming a pastor, I worked at various colleges and universities for a couple of decades as an English and Humanities instructor.)

I answered that one slice of academia I did NOT miss was all of the grading, but that I did miss the rewards of reading challenging works filled with complex ideas and then discussing them with others who have read those works as well.  (One of the shortcomings of digging into great works of literature within a college course, however, is that too many of the young-adult students in the class would be so obsessed with getting good grades in school in order to find good jobs after graduation that they underappreciated the intellectual opportunities to uplift one’s mind and open new ways of understanding—and thereby better appreciating—the universe around us, which for me means appreciating the Kosmos,  the orderly, nuanced, and complex everything that God has created both for His glory and for our awe.)

I also shared with the parishioner that I am fortunate to be in a Great Books Reading Club, which provides me with mental challenges from the ideas contained in the literary and philosophical works followed by rewarding discussions about those works with others who are members in our reading group. 

There are only three of us in our Great Books Reading Club and all of us are pastors in a small Wisconsin town (in the United States).  The other two pastors majored in Philosophy as undergraduates, while I majored in English.  We all eventually attended theological seminaries, then began working as pastors, and we now make time within our schedules to meet once a month to discuss those “Great Books.”

In the past two or so years, our little group has read Plato’s Republic, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, and Nietzsche’s  On the Genealogy of Morals; we are currently working our way through Milton’s Paradise Lost. I plan to share some reflections on these works in my future WordPress  posts, thereby doing my small part to extend the discussion on what Mortimer Adler defined in the mid-twentieth century as “Great Books” participating in a “Great Conversation” about  “Great Ideas” that have contributed to culture and society, and that continue to influence our ideas, identities, politics, and worldviews even today.  

Stop back for more of this discussion later . . .