GREAT CONVERSATIONS

Our Great Conversations reading group is currently discussing: The Grand Inquisitor.

The Grand Inquisitor is a chapter from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book, The Brothers Karamazov.

It is proving to be another one of our more enthusiastically discussed selections, so much so that we are going to continue discussing it again next week.

The basic argument of the chapter is being related through a conversation between two brothers, Ivan, an Atheist, and Alyosha, a Monk.

The dialog, and our discussion, involves the philosophical aspects of Religion, Human Nature, Freedom, Free Will, and Happiness; all these are common themes throughout our discussion series.

To lighten the atmosphere a bit we watched a somewhat related Woody Allen film, Love and Death; it is rife with typical Woody Allen humor and satire. The film is set in Russia during the Napoleonic War, with plenty of Gogolian and Dostoevsky’n lines as parody.

In conclusion: I recommend The Grand Inquisitor as a thought-provoking piece of reading. At twenty-seven pages it is a quick read; but you may find yourself rereading several of the passages, and thinking about them a lot, over the next few days.

The Grand Inquisitor is available as public domain on the Internet.
Or one can take the easy way and read the synopsis offered on Wikkipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073312/