Series
Commending the Classics
Huck Finn and the Providential Benefit of Good Novels
Mark Twain’s make-believe adventure confounds the human instinct to search for meaning in this universe.
Prodigal Grace for a Dying Pastor
Ames’s struggle to reconcile the true gravity of human sin with the free grace of God’s forgiveness is complicated by his unique role in Jack’s life.
Dying with a Quiet Heart
With death approaching, the protagonist reminisces about the past, which he describes honestly and poignantly without lapsing into undue sentimentality.
The Challenges Every Pastor Faces
One of Robinson’s extraordinary accomplishments in Gilead is to establish, as a woman, a plausible narrative voice for a man and, as a layperson, a pastor.
Positive Portrayal of the Pastorate
Gilead is an epistolary novel, written by a pastor in his 70s to a son who is too young to receive all the wisdom an old man wants to share.
Read Hawthorne’s Classic Story ‘Young Goodman Brown’
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” is a classic of American fiction. It was published anonymously in New England magazine in 1835, and later reprinted under Hawthorne’s name in his short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The world portrayed within the story is the same 17th-century Puritan New England world that Hawthorne later evoked in The Scarlet Letter. Specifically, this story is set in “Salem village” (as the opening sentence quaintly labels it). The entire frame of reference within the story is Puritan, with references to minister, deacon, Sabbath day, catechism, sin, and such things. While...
Piper, Ryken, Reynolds, and Nielson Commend the Classics
This week The Gospel Coalition welcomes you to join us in an exciting new series called Commending the Classics. We’re thrilled to welcome Wheaton College professor Leland Ryken as a sort of literature scholar in residence to guide us as we read classic books together. Every week he’ll lend us his decades of learning to help us understand why these works have come to be regarded as timeless treasures. Have you ever thought, I’ve heard that book is great, but I’m intimidated to read it myself without any help? Then we’ve designed this series precisely with you in mind. You...
