How Great Books Teach Us to Love

Gary Saul Morson teaches the largest class at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Stereotypes about students today would suggest he must teach a salacious course on sexuality or an economics class that promises future consulting riches. Instead he teaches Russian literature in the Slavic department, and every year about 500 students read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in 10 weeks.

Morson bucks the trend of declining enrollments in literature courses. In a recent article for Commentary magazine, titled “Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature,” Morson sympathizes with students who say they have nothing to gain by reading the classics. But he says they’re not more materialistic than students were during economic booms of the 1950s or 1980s. And despite what you read about attention spans and Twitter, these same students devoured all seven books in the Harry Potter series when they were younger.

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Morson is the Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts at Northwestern and my former teacher. As a journalism and European history double major at Northwestern I took his course in the winter of 2002. Those few short months changed my life, even though I had no background in Russian literature and little formation that would suggest I could appreciate these great works.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.

But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.

To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.

Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is professor of the arts and humanities at Northwestern University. He chaired the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years prior to leaving for Illinois.