Hitchens and the Dead Russians

Life

Christopher Hutchins is after religion, in more or less the same self-congratulatory manner that atheists have been going at it for the past 200 years. Aside from the general gist of his arguments, I found this fascinating quote:

[We] find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Ahem. Is Hitchens somehow unaware of the fact that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were both devout Orthodox Christians? I don’t see how anyone could possibly read The Brothers Karamazov and not realize that it is a work of a religious mind, and that its ethical vision is inextricable from its religious setting. Likewise for Anna Karenina. Now, it may be that Hitchens appreciates these books despite their religious content, but that would contradict the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Except, I suppose, for the great religious writers that Hitchens admires.

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The End of History

Life | Quotations

Today God hits reset.
Today is the end of history and the beginning of eternity.
Death is turned inside-out and runs backwards on itself.
No more hiding in your sins.
Come out, come out wherever you are.

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The Bridegroom

Life | Theology

Last night I went to the Presanctified Liturgy at St. Paul’s Orthodox Church, the last one before Easter. Or Pascha, as the Orthodox are prone to say, even though I prefer to use the normal English name. Anyway, it was wonderful and striking and all of the things that the liturgy usually is, but a few things stood out to me:

The Bridegroom icon. The juxtaposition of theme and name is a theological treatise of its own: Christ in his passion, wearing the crown of thorns, dressed in the red that the soldiers mocked him with. This is the Bridegroom, and this is His wedding garment. I found the piety associated with this particular icon to be profound as well: the icon was placed on a table in the middle of the room with thorn branches on either side of it, and the people prostrated twice before venerating it and once afterwards.

The Psalms. We sang fourteen psalms in their entirety. That was a lot of psalms. Despite having never heard the particular chant melody before, I found it simple to follow and was quickly able to sing along with the rest of the congregation.

The antidoron. All of the antidoron I’ve ever taken was chewy and tasteless. St. Paul’s, for some reason, used a spiced, slightly sweet artisan bread. It was delicious.

And best of all, they anointed everyone with oil at the end, including me.

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It’s Done

Life

120,000 words.
413 pages.
32 chapters.

The first draft of my novel is done!

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