Fyodor Dostoevsky

In preparation for next month's meeting for The Gambler I read one of Dostoevsky's other less commonly read novels The House of the Dead. One of the reasons for reading (and loving) Dostoevsky is that he can open up the soul of man and shine light into every crevasse. The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical story about being in a Siberian prison (see my review here). I'll leave you with a quote regarding the prison officers that were in charge of corporal punishment (a brutal process consisting sometimes of 1000's of lashes with sticks), one of the great passages dealing with psychology and behavior in anything I've read...

Anyone who has once experienced this power, this unlimited mastery of the body, blood and soul of a fellow man made of the same clay as himself, a brother in the law of Christ - anyone who has experienced the power and full license to inflict the greatest humiliation upon another creature made in the image of God will unconsciously lose the mastery of his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease. I maintain that the very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habit. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible. Moreover, the example, the possibility of such despotism, has a perverting influence on the whole of society: such power is a temptation. Society, which looks indifferently on such a phenomenon, is already contaminated to its very foundations. In short, the right of corporal punishment given to one man over another is one of the sores of  social life, one of the strongest forces destructive of every germ, every effort in society towards civic feeling, and a sufficient cause for its inevitable dissolution.

Spiritual Autobigraphies

Augustine is the first writer to answer that annoying question: Who wants to hear about my life, anyway?  For Augustine, as for Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, Thomas Merton,  and an unbroken line of spiritual autobiographers who stretch  right up to Charles Colson, the answer is: all those, who like me, are sinners (by any measure, a wide intended readership).  If the purpose of autobiography is to point sinners to grace, the autobiographer can be humble and self-centered.  Minute, individual self-examination (a most satisfying activity) has enormous importance to thousands of readers.  After all, the same divine image sleeps in them; they must perform the same self-scrutiny and encounter the same God.  

                                                   
                                                   -Susan Wise Bauer, The Well Educated Mind

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Dana says: Within the first few pages of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens I had to stop and wonder why on earth I had waited 36 years to read him! I don't want to get ahead of myself but I think its pretty safe to say that after reading just one of his books, I already love him. Had I no other reading responsibilities I would spend all of 2016 soaking up all the Dickens I could.

A Christmas Carol is a familiar enough story, as it has been represented in so many different film adaptations over the years but it seems to me nothing was quite like reading it. Dickens greatest strength lies the in power of his description and I only wish my own vocabulary greater so that I could do him justice when trying to praise his writing. From the ghost of Marley (shake those chains!) to the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future Dickens does a superb job of telling a fantastic story that delights and disturbs the reader, all the while making the reader search his or her own heart in regards to the many issues Dickens brings up in A Christmas Carol. I really loved this book and now understand why my good friend Betsy reads it every year at Christmas time. Count me in and bring on more Dickens! 

Delightful Instruction

"When it comes to imaginative literature, our time is best spent with works that both "delight and instruct," a phrase primarily associated with the Roman writer Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), used in one version or another by many other critics.  Aristotle explained that literature doesn't get in the way of understanding real life, it actually helps us understand real life.  Appreciating imitation- and any form of representation- is an intellectual virtue.  Reading and studying literature, therefore, does not detract from understanding reality, but actively contributes to your knowledge of truth.  You learn something about reality by looking at imitations of it."

               - Steven J. Venturino, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Literary Criticism

Through Western Eyes, Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective - Robert Letham

This is a wonderful book for someone looking for insight into the Eastern Orthodox history, theology and church practice. Letham's strength is the historical summation which gives not only an understanding of where and how doctrine developed but deeper appreciation for the depth of thought and often controversy involved in what we now often take for granted in our systematic theology.

The Eastern Church has many problems (lack of exegesis, iconography, incomplete view of justification, etc.) but they also have things that the Reformed Church can learn from especially the focus on Trinitarianism and the Unions (Trinity, Incarnation and Theosis). Letham presents the East in a way that makes them less threatening and allows a Reformed thinker to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water. In fact, I now believe that the Reformed have more in common with E.O. than with much of the broader Western Evangelicalism.

This is an important book.