The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
“God created things which had free will. That means creatures, which can go wrong or right… If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will… though it makes evil1 possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” 2 I. [...]
I. Introduction There was a time in days gone by when honor was the driving force behind the life of every great, good, and decent man. Every action of his hand, every thought that found its way from the mind to the mouth and past the lips, every motivation for every endeavor worthy of his [...]
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” i In time in memoriam, this Christian proverb would be found deep in the hearts and readily on the tongues of all, and if not the proverb itself, then certainly the sentiment thereof. In our modern age, however, men have turned away from the wisdom of [...]
It is my pleasure to be able to introduce Nalin Ranasinghe’s Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias to you as one of the most able, eloquent, noble, profound, and loving books ever written on Socrates. Ranasinghe restores for us the example of a moral hero who inaugurated a moral revolution in opposition to his [...]
In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent. The clouds of radical relativism seem to obscure the light of objective truth and it can be difficult to discern any [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. Interview of Joseph Pearce by Annamarie Adkins After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached [...]
Nicholas Berdyaev stressed the primacy of culture and theological issues over politics and economics as truer forms of reality. He argued that only when society has realigned itself, individual by individual and community by community, “towards divine objects” could humanity save itself. One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and [...]
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of [...]
An excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture found in Beauty Will Save the World (by Gregory Wolfe): Dostoevsky once enigmatically let drop the phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty [...]
“Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges moving on and on. And the motors of [...]