April 25--29 The Battlefield for the Heart of Man

 God and devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov



Fyodor Dostoevsky



Monday, April 25
Finish Reading Tolstoy Selections This Week:  "Master and Man" and "The Death of Ivan Ilych."  If you wish, you can read "Family Happiness."
Read the Humanities Blog essay on Russian Literature.
Finish Reading and discussing the introductory material to Darwin's Origin of the Species.
Receive Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto.  Humanity students of the world unite; we have nothing to lost but faith and freedom if we do not seek for Godly Reformation.

Tuesday, April 26
Discuss Readings--Tolstoy, Darwin, and Marx
Begin Assignment from Western Civilization:  Either write four pages of Notes about the 19th Century or write a two page (typed) report on either Socialism, Communism, or Nationalism. (Due Wednesday of Next Week.)
Finish watching "Victoria and Her Sisters."

Wednesday, April 27
Continue Discussing the Readings.
Continue Working on the writing assignment.
Discuss and work on the Darwin Chapter Assignments:  Due on Thursday, Friday, or Monday.

Thursday, April 28
Updates on Darwin Works and Readings.
Continue working on Writing Assignment.
Exchange Tolstoy for Dostoevsky

Friday, April 29
Updates and Presentations on Darwin
An Antidote to the Communist Manifesto:  "The Christian Manifesto of 1984" by Francis Nigel Lee
Edging into Dostoevsky



“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”



In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said:

The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of  Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.

 The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now."

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation, 2007