Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'

September 07, 2021

Dreher: A virtuous resistance against totalitarianism must challenge the status quo – especially in classrooms

What’s the foundation of a good education system? Creativity and courage, according to Rod Dreher, author of the bestselling book “Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” Dreher argues it is these creative and courageous educators who will best “dare to disrupt” the Marxist domination of students’ and teachers’ freedom of speech and critical thinking. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2021

Solzhenitsyn: Prophet to America

Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds. University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages. English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes. Continue Reading...
February 06, 2019

The gospel of humanitarianism

In The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018), Daniel J. Mahoney confronts a central heresy of our age, the “remarkably truncated view of human beings” that fails to “acknowledge the hierarchy of goods and values that characterize the moral order and the life of the soul.” Continue Reading...
December 12, 2018

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dragon slayer

At City Journal, Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney offers “A Centennial Tribute” marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian author’s birth. Mahoney, who holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, describes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as “the century’s greatest critic of the totalitarian immolation of liberty and human dignity.” Continue Reading...
December 11, 2018

An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn centenary

On this day in 1918, Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, parents of peasant stock who had received a university education. Continue Reading...