07/28/2025 – “An idea becomes close to you only when you are aware of it in your soul, when in reading about it seems to you that it has already occurred to you, that you know it and are simply recalling it. That’s how it was when I read the Gospels. In the Gospels I discovered a new world: I had not supposed that there was such a depth of thought in them. Yet it all seemed so familiar; it seemed that I had known it all long ago, that I had only forgotten it.” (Tolstoy, as recorded in Bulgakov’s Diary, 18 April 1910)
I remember as a young boy, my mother picking up my father picking up my father from his daily 50 mile train commute on the Chicago Loop. I recall him carrying Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. So in retrospect it is no surprise I put that together with a comment I recall later: “The great 19th century Russian novelists were the country’s theologians asking: “Who is God?”; “Who is Man?”, and “What is our relationship to Him?” And sure enough, one of my favorite novels is “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoevsky.
Soli Deo Gloria!