My Working Canon of the Western World
A Personal Project in Christian Intellectual Formation
The “great books” tradition stretches back at least to Plato. Over the past year, I’ve re-engaged it in a more deliberate way. In many respects, this is a natural extension of the theological work that has shaped me for the past decade. I want to understand how my Christian faith stands in conversation with the great works of the world. I also want to encounter, without apology, the highest aesthetic and intellectual achievements of our civilization.
So I’ve begun assembling a personal canon — focused largely on the Western tradition, read from within a Reformed Protestant frame. This is not an official list, and certainly not an exhaustive one. It is simply an attempt to read seriously, in continuity with the past, and to be formed by the best that has been thought and written.
I’m grateful to Ben Robin, Morne Morais, Rebecca Lowe, Henry Oliver, Michael Franz, James K. Hamilton, Garrett Kell, Jason Seville, Larry Nikol (Lawrence High), and others who have nudged me back toward these sources. Also thanks to ChatGPT for helping pull works from St. Johns, Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and church history.
This list is a living document. It will change. Where possible, I’ll recommend specific editions; Penguin Classics has been especially helpful. I have not read all of these works (not even a majority!) but each has endured for a reason. The focus here is largely Western, not because other traditions lack depth or greatness, but because I am not well-versed in them.
If I’m missing something essential — or including something overrated — I’m open to persuasion.
ANCIENT
● Sophocles – Antigone
● Euripides – Medea
● Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
● Plato – Republic (or Plato’s Collected works)
● Plato – Symposium
● Plato – Apology
● Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics
● Aristotle – Politics
● Virgil – Aeneid
● Ovid – Metamorphoses
● Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
● Plutarch – Lives
● Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
● The Hebrew Bible / Old Testament
LATE ANTIQUITY & EARLY MEDIEVAL
● Augustine - On the Trinity
● Augustine - On Christian Doctrine
● Irenaeus – Against Heresies
● Athanasius – On the Incarnation
● Basil – On the Holy Spirit
● Gregory of Nazianzus – Theological Orations
● Gregory the Great - Pastoral Rule
● Boethius – Consolation of Philosophy
● Dante – Divine Comedy
● Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica (selections)
● Chaucer – Canterbury Tales
● Christine de Pizan – Book of the City of Ladies
RENAISSANCE & EARLY MODERN
● Montaigne – Essays
● Thomas More – Utopia
● Martin Luther – On the Freedom of a Christian
● John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion (1541 Edition)
● Cervantes – Don Quixote
● Shakespeare – Hamlet (for any Shakespeare, I’ve found the Folger editions to be superb)
● Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
● Milton – Paradise Lost
● Hobbes – Leviathan
PURITAN/RESTORATION/ENLIGHTENMENT
● Descartes – Meditations
● John Bunyan - Pilgrim’s Progress
● Pascal – Pensées
● Spinoza – Ethics
● Locke – Second Treatise of Government (for classical liberal texts, Liberty Fund has done a nice job with e-pubs)
● Hume – Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
● Rousseau – Social Contract
● Montesquieu – Spirit of the Laws
● Adam Smith – Wealth of Nations
● Kant – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
● Federalist Papers
● Edmund Burke - Reflections on the Revolution in France
● William Cowper - Selected Poetry
● Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
19TH CENTURY
● Goethe – Faust
● Wordsworth – Prelude
● Austen – Pride and Prejudice
● Austen – Emma
● Stendhal – The Red and the Black
● Dickens – Great Expectations
● Dickens – Bleak House
● George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
● George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
● Tolstoy – War and Peace
● Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilyich
● Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
● Dostoevsky – Brothers Karamazov
● Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
● Kierkegaard – Either/Or
● Marx – Capital
● Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
● Ibsen – A Doll’s House
● Whitman – Leaves of Grass
● J.S. Mill - On Liberty
● J.S. Mill - Autobiography
● J.S. Mill on the Subjugation of Women
● Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
● W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
20TH CENTURY LITERATURE
● Proust – In Search of Lost Time
● Kafka – The Trial
● Joyce - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
● Woolf – To the Lighthouse
● Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
● Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
● Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
● Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
● Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise
● Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
● T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
● Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
● Yeats – Selected Poems
● Rilke – Duino Elegies
● Camus – The Stranger
● J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
● Beckett – Waiting for Godot
● Mann – The Magic Mountain
● V.S. Naipaul - A Bend in the River
● V.S. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival
● Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
● Orwell – 1984
● W.H. Auden – Selected Poems
● Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
● J.K. Rowling - The Harry Potter Series
● Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
● Toni Morrison – Beloved
20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY/POLITICS/MISC
● Russell Kirk - The Conservative Mind
● Solzhenitsyn – Gulag Archipelago
● Martin Luther King Jr. - Letters and Speeches
● Robert Nozick - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
● John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
● John Finnis - Natural Law and Natural Rights
● Leo Strauss - Natural Right and History
● Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
● F.A. Hayek - The Road to Serfdom
● F.A. Hayek - The Use of Knowledge in Society
● Michael Oakeshott - Rationalism
●The Last Lion
● Edmund Morris - Theodore Roosevelt Series
● Cry, Beloved Country
● Thomas Sowell - Race and Culture
● How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
● Penguin Book of Prose Poems
REFORMED/PROTESTANT THEOLOGY
● Heinrich Bullinger – Second Helvetic Confession
● Synod of Dort – Canons of Dort
● Westminster Assembly – Westminster Confession of Faith
● Westminster Assembly – Larger Catechism
● Westminster Assembly – Shorter Catechism
● Heidelberg Catechism
● Belgic Confession
● London Baptist Confession
● Martin Bucer – On the Kingdom of Christ
● Francis Turretin – Institutes of Elenctic Theology
● Herman Witsius – Economy of the Covenants
● John Owen – The Death of Death in the Death of Christ
● John Owen – Mortification of Sin
● Richard Baxter – The Reformed Pastor
● Thomas Watson - The Beatitudes
● Thomas Watson - All Things for Good
● Thomas Goodwin – Christ Set Forth
● Stephen Charnock – The Existence and Attributes of God
● Wilhelmus à Brakel – The Christian’s Reasonable Service
● Jonathan Edwards – Religious Affections (let’s be honest, all Edwards work should all be in)
● Jonathan Edwards- The End for Which God Created the World
● Jonathan Edwards – Freedom of the Will
● B.B. Warfield – Inspiration and Authority of the Bible
● Geerhardus Vos – Biblical Theology
● Herman Bavinck – Reformed Dogmatics
● Herman Bavinck - The Wonderful Works of God
● Abraham Kuyper – Lectures on Calvinism
● J. Gresham Machen – Christianity and Liberalism
● Cornelius Van Til – Defense of the Faith
● John Murray – Redemption Accomplished and Applied
● C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
● C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man
● C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed
● Martyn Lloyd-Jones – Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
● Meredith Kline – Kingdom Prologue
● Herman Ridderbos – Paul: An Outline of His Theology
● J.I. Packer - Evangelism & the Sovereignty of God
● R.C. Sproul – The Holiness of God
● Francis Schaeffer – The God Who Is There
● Sinclair Ferguson – The Christian Life
● John Frame – The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God
● Kevin Vanhoozer – The Drama of Doctrine
● Richard Gaffin – By Faith, Not by Sight
● Carl Trueman – The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
● Oliver O’Donovan – Resurrection and Moral Order
● Tim Keller – The Reason for God
● Stephen Wellum – Systematic Theology
● Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum - Kingdom Through Covenant
● G.K. Beale - A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New
● Robert Letham – The Holy Trinity
● 9 Marks of a Healthy Church or The Church - Mark Dever
*Thanks to Chat GPT for heavy edits of my introductory paragraph.
This is wonderfully exhaustive list, and I'm not much of a book reader. Yet, I would offer maybe not a "Great Work" but a work that I think is great. Probably no one book has had more influence on me than Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul (I will write about this some day).
It changed how I thought about conservatism as a movement, having grown up in world where conservatism was defined by Newt Gingrich and the Bush Administration.
It didn't convert me or change my politics. But it taught me me something more important, I think: to have greater compassion for people I perceived as my "opponents," because I can't know what motivates their commitments without asking, exploring, and questioning.