parresia

I came across a gold

I came across a gold mine today in the Barnes and Noble across the street from my new place of employment. It's called The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. Basically it is a series of excerpts from Dost's works ranging from the inimitable Brothers to the lesser known work The Adolescent that exemplify Dostoyevsky's sublime ability to relate THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. Here is the forward (you'll soon see why I was immediately drawn to this book).

Dostoyevsky is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pinpoint the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God's amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ's and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. Dostoyevsky's immediate frame of reference is Eastern Orthodoxy and the cultural turmoil of the nineteenth-century Russia, but his constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer. In the passages selected here, a supersensitive giant of the imagination projects a uniquely poignant vision of the plight of man and the power of God. If it makes you weep and worship, you will be the better for it. If it does not, that will show that you have not yet seen what you are looking at, and you will be wise to read the book again.

Now...guess who wrote that? ANSWER

Muggeridge among other things had this to say of THE AUTHOR (as I am now going to refer to Dostoyevsky, much like Aquinas referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher.") "Supposing one were asked to name a book calculated to give an unbeliever today a clear notion of what Christianity is about, could one hope to do much better than The Brothers Karamazov?

Whatismore, the publishing company Plough Publishing House is an up and coming Christian publishing house that I am happy to support. I first became aware of their "ministry" when I read And She Said Yes: the story of Cassie Bernall (one of the girls coldly murdered at Columbine High School) which just so happens to be another book that I do recommend. For more information on their publications you can call this number: 800-521-8011. Plough.com What I like about Plough (although I don't know a lot about them, so I ought to careful in my endorsement) is that they publish Christian books on subjects that seem to "slip" into the secular sections without a fuss. Though this is the goal of all Christian publishing houses, it seems Plough has had some success in it. I applaud and very much hope to emulate their desire to bring Christian truth "right into the marketplace." Bravo!

I was in training tonight at Banana and wouldn't you know it the girl sitting across from me had Dostoyevsky's Demons sitting in front of her. It turns out she has read almost all of his works, and is a huge fan of Russian literature in general (although she does admit that Dost is the best of them all). We began to talk about Dostoyevsky's "drive/motive" and she mentioned his struggles in Siberia (he spent years in exile), and I want to kick myself for not knowing more of Dost's history so that I could have brought in Dost's true foundation which was Christianity. But, I will have plenty of opportunity to talk with her, my prayer is that she'll be open to the Gospel, and that I'll have the courage to speak the truth.