John J. Miller, director of the Dow journalism program at Hillsdale College, didn’t get much of a religious education growing up, he told JNS, so he has been trying to compensate as an adult.
After reading the Bible cover to cover a few years ago, Miller, a national correspondent for National Review, wrote about it for the magazine. He noted reading the passage in Mark that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
“My first thought was: Why is Jesus quoting Abraham Lincoln?” Miller told JNS. “I had it backward. One lesson is that to understand Lincoln, you need some knowledge of the Bible. But it’s more than that, too. To understand who we are as Americans, we need to know this book.”
One can never know the Bible fully, but Miller told JNS that he has tried to read a bit from it daily. “It’s the greatest of the Great Books.”
Miller, who recently recorded farewell messages for his Bookmonger and Great Books podcasts, thinks that biblical illiteracy is a large problem for both Judaism and Christianity. It’s also a problem for those “who want to understand Western literature, because so much of it assumes a knowledge of biblical stories, characters and ideas,” he said.
Among the roughly 1,000 episodes of Bookmonger and 371 Great Books episodes, Miller told JNS that he learned a good deal about Judaism and Israel. He recently released an episode on Anne Frank’s diary, and he has recorded on The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Theodor Herzl’s Zionist writings, the Kennicott Bible, The Jew of Malta, Josephus, Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein.
“I’m not Jewish. I’m Catholic, and I learned a ton about Jewish faith and traditions as well as Israel from these shows, during the research and preparation, as well as the recordings,” he told JNS.
Before preparing to interview Ruth Wisse, Yiddish literature and comparative literature professor emerita at Harvard University and a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, Miller knew “next to nothing” about Sholem Aleichem.
“The show with Ruth Wisse had me looking up the origins of Yiddish and considering the source of Fiddler on the Roof, which, of course, is based on a story by Sholem Aleichem,” he told JNS. “There were a lot of moments like that. I didn’t know much about the deep roots of Zionism until I recorded a show on the writings of Theodor Herzl.”
“For me, this was an education in the ‘Judeo’ part of ‘Judeo-Christianity,’” he said.
Miller recorded podcasts on the biblical books of Judith, Ruth, Song of Songs, Isaiah and Job—the latter with the renowned scholar Robert Alter—and he has discussed Jew-hatred on podcasts about Roald Dahl and The Merchant of Venice.
An episode with Dan Senor about the book The Genius of Israel, which Senor co-authored with Saul Singer, is one of Miller’s favorite episodes of Bookmonger.
The book, which came out shortly after Oct. 7, “has a good subtitle: ‘The surprising resilience of a divided nation in a turbulent world,’” Miller told JNS. “We discussed the ‘resilience’ of Israel at a time when Israel really needed its resilience.”
Miller remembers that Senor noted that data suggests Israelis are among the world’s happiest people, and they have many children, “which is a mark of optimism and purpose.”
“I learned a lot from this book and this conversation,” he said. “I think Americans and others have a lot to learn from the example of today’s Israelis.”
Discontinuing the two podcasts wasn’t Miller’s choice, and he told JNS that he was “surprised and disappointed” that National Review ended them. “I guess nothing lasts forever,” he said.
After recording a farewell episode for each podcast, Miller has received “some of the nicest emails I’ve ever gotten about anything,” he said. “They make me want to keep going. We’ll see about that. The shows would need a new institutional home.”
For now, he’s enjoying his first podcasting break in 18 years. “I’m reminded of a line by Winston Churchill, about whom I’ve recorded a number of podcasts,” Miller said. “‘The future, though imminent, is obscure.’”
‘I’d exhaust Homer’
Miller told JNS that Bookmonger dates back to 2007, when Kathryn Lopez, who was then the editor of National Review Online, asked if he knew about this new thing called podcasting. “I had, but only because I had just read something about it,” Miller said.
The two came up with the idea of 10-minute author interviews, which would be “a chance to showcase an interesting new book by a worthy author, who would have a chance to make an elevator pitch.”
Miller and Lopez called it “Between the Covers” initially. It was twice weekly at some point, but for years, it has been weekly. “There are probably in the range of 1,000 episodes, but I’ve lost track of the exact number,” Miller said.
In 2017, Jack Fowler, who was then the National Review publisher, told Miller that he wanted to expand the podcasts and asked if he had ideas. Miller conceived of Great Books, which would be “30-minute interviews with scholars and experts about the classic books they love,” he said.
“It’s been weekly since then, with a total of 371 shows,” he said.
He had wondered about the longevity of Great Books. “There are only so many Great Books. At some point, I figured, I’d exhaust Homer and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the rest. But I didn’t know when that would be,” he said. “In practice, I never had trouble coming up with a new topic, though sometimes the Great Books podcast was more like the Very Good Books podcast.”
“Is Charlotte’s Web a ‘Great Book’ in the classic sense? Maybe not,” he said. “But it’s definitely a Very Good Book, and it made for an excellent show.”
Some of his favorite moments on the podcasts have been about approaching the Great Books in a down-to-earth way, without getting too starstruck.
During his 2017 podcast with his Hillsdale colleague and English professor Dwight Lindley about Paradise Lost, the two talked about Milton’s first lines. “Dwight said that Milton boasts that he’ll rise above Homer and Virgil, and then he commented that this was Milton pulling ‘an Air Jordan move.’”
“I loved the way this mixed the high art of Milton with today’s pop culture, in a way that illuminates the old text in our age,” Miller said. “I think that’s what the best teachers often do. They show how long-dead authors speak to us across time.”
When he recorded a podcast on The Iliad, which he said is “maybe the greatest of the Great Books if you exclude the Bible,” Miller asked the scholar Robin Lane Fox what his favorite character was in the book.
“He didn’t say Achilles or Hector or another famous hero, but Phylas, a minor character who demonstrates grandfatherly love,” Miller said. “Fox mentioned his love for his own grandchildren and then pointed out that people in Homer’s time were in fundamental ways no different from us.”
‘Liberals in the old-fashioned sense’
Over the years, Miller found that authors were happy to come on Bookmonger, because they had an opportunity to tell book readers—and book buyers—about their new publications. “Almost nobody whom I invited onto the show refused,” he said. “The Great Books show was a little trickier.”
Guests on the latter show had nothing to hawk generally. “The only thing they had to offer was their love for the topic, and the only thing I could offer them was a platform to express it,” Miller said.
He was frustrated at times when he couldn’t find the right guest to discuss a book he wanted to discuss, or when guests backed out in the 11th hour, which happened “several” times, when they saw that the show was part of National Review.
“They didn’t want to associate with icky conservatives,” Miller said. “Many of the guests, in fact, were liberals, and they were happy to discuss the books they love with anybody, no matter how they voted. They were liberals in the best, old-fashioned sense.”
Once, he had a guest scheduled to talk about a Harlem Renaissance author, and the guest dropped out “for transparently political reasons.” That guest “turned down an opportunity to talk to a National Review audience about the value of the Harlem Renaissance,” Miller said. “I never could understand that.”
The Great Books, to Miller, contain multitudes.
“All the wisdom in the world is in the Great Books. They have different things to say, speak to different matters and often are in conflict with each other,” he told JNS. “But reading them, whether it’s dozens or just a few, is a great way to learn about everything: God, human nature, love, war, freedom, equality, justice and more. It’s all there.”