Teaching with Authority, by
Jimmy Akin (2008, Catholic Answers Press, Softcover, 425 pgs.)
How to Cut Through Confusion
and Understand What the Church Really Says. “Teaching with Authority is
a unique, valuable, and long-overdue resource for all Catholics as well as
those inquiring about the Faith. It will help deepen your understanding of what
the Church teaches by showing you (maybe for the first time) how and why and
where it does. Not another catechism or Catholicism for beginners book, Teaching
with Authority isn’t about understanding specific teachings of the Faith
(even the complicated and misunderstood ones) but rather about understanding
Catholic teaching itself. Where does the Church s teaching authority come from?
How do we weigh dogmas versus practices, doctrines versus disciplines,
conciliar declarations versus papal interviews? How do we sort through the many
kinds of ecclesial documents and determine their relative authority and
relevance? And, in an age when accusations of heresy fly regularly across social
media, with competing sides eager to paint the other as unfaithful to Catholic
tradition or to the current pope, Jimmy also tackles the issues of incredulity,
apostasy, and schism showing you how to recognize different forms of dissent
and respond to them fittingly.” – Amazon. (from the back cover).
Solzhenitsyn: A
Soul in Exile (Revised and Expanded Version), by Joseph Pearce (2011, Ignatius
Press, Softcover, 392 pgs.)
“Based on exclusive,
personal interviews with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Pearce's biography of
the renowned Russian dissident provides profound insight into a towering
literary and political figure.
From his pro-Communist youth
to his imprisonment in forced labor camps, from his exile in America to his
return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn struggled with the weightiest questions of human
existence: When a person has suffered the most terrible physical and emotional
torture, what becomes of his spirit? Can science, politics and economics truly
provide all of man's needs?
In his acclaimed literary
and historical works, Solzhenitsyn exposed the brutality of the Soviet regime.
Most famous for his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and
his three-volume expose of the Russian police state, The Gulag
Archipelago, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.
Solzhenitsyn's Christian
faith deeply informed his response to the inhumanity of modern materialism as
it took shape in twentieth- century Russia. His critique applies not only to
Communism, however, but also to the post-Christian capitalism now dominant in
the West. On the spiritual, cultural, and socio-political level, his writings
still have much to teach the world.
This book also contains a
gallery of rare photographs.” – Amazon.
I decided to finally order
the Solzhenitsyn book for a variety of reasons. For one, Mike had always been
interested in him since high school, realizing that he was a force in Russian
literature, which was one of his areas of special attraction. I remember seeing
his copy of The Gulag Archipelago and wondering what it was like. For
another, Solzhenitsyn had just been the subject on Joseph Pearce’s The
Authority (a program available on YouTube), and the fact that Pearce had
actually met and communicated with him and produced the only biography that was
authorized by the Russian author. That Maurice Baring (whom I have been
reading) was in his day (before the revolution) an authority on Russia and the
Russian people, and I was reading much about the country in his works, also piqued
my interest. So it seemed quite obvious that the biography was indicated for my
next big read.
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