Posted on 09/18/2013 11:43:50 AM PDT by RBStealth
... According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another man who read history through Slavic cultural lenses, the unique horrors of the 20th century had taken place because (as the Russian novelist and chronicler put it in his 1983 Templeton Prize lecture) men and women had forgotten God: “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.” French theologian Henri de Lubac made a similar point in The Drama of Atheist Humanism: The 20th century proved that men and women could indeed organize the world without God; but without God, they could only organize it against each other.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
The magnificent animated history of Poland (8:31). Created for the Shanghai Expo of 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrXgj1NwN8
The 20th century proved that men and women could indeed organize the world without God; but without God, they could only organize it against each other.
Solzhenitsyn's great gift to humanity was to generalize what he experienced in Soviet communism as a warning to the world.
Not only did he NOT "read history through Slavic cultural lenses," it was preceisely BECAUSE he did not do so, that his writings and teaching are so incredibly valuable.
That's why he's so deliberately misrepresented by collectivists, as is done here.
yada yada yada
To everyone else:
Slavic Culture is Christianity.
Precisely, the East Slavs Orthodox Christianity and the West Slavs Roman Catholicism, with South Slavs split by the two religions. Of course quite a bit of Slavic Culture was suppressed by the Soviet system for quite a while.
George Weigel who is a Catholic intellectual, and Republican by the way, was picked by Pope John Paul II and granted insider status to write his biography. Weigel served as the founding president of the James Madison Foundation (not to be confused with the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation) from 1986 to 1989. In 1994, he was a signer of the document Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Calling George Weigel a ‘collectivist’ is precisely the kind of uneducated drivel that passes for comment on this forum.
In addition, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is known for his writing that details the consequences of the loss of God in a nation or culture. It is practical writing, spiritual writing, philosophical writing and writing of consequence.
Solzhenitsyn’s writing is prophetic in nature because of the power of the disciplines of philosophy and theology and recognizing the absence of God in a civilization, nation or culture and its attendant effects.
addendum: Alexander Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an Orthodox Christian and his writing was through that Orthodox lense.
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