1. Fyodor Dostoevsky

(Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcXrLGGDYCTcEMvvkonUYKUUpzBGB_c1340vA7HsyibBPX64NIfv-lQR8VIX1o1lk6xEKYjksBqowlH90ztsejyJM-7CF6omIiYjmhuYYXB517k3U-4XjbDtG7449WT3d5WWJt7q75q2WB/s1600/dostoevsky1.jpg)

Bam. Dostoevsky always makes me urge to continue reading like no one else. I like Tolstoy, too. The Russian writers are just so different and deep and dark and intense and intricate and difficult.

Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky is considered by many as the greatest novelist of all time. He’s a master of exploring psychology in his works. He writes in the context of social and spiritual unrest, and he weaves characters, plots, and settings into incredibly insightful and thought-provoking literature. He forces you to think about and question yourself, the nature of our existence, and the human condition. Isolation, redemption, struggle, guilt, ethic, and suffering are dominant themes in his works. He’s a brilliant storyteller who packs so much into such… long stories. I like that he often pits two opposing ideas against each other and works out their battles through his stories. You hang on every word. Realism isn’t a favorite genre of mine, but Dostoevsky is an exception.

I like my literature philosophical, and the Mad Russian fits the bill perfectly. His works are epic in every sense of the word.

Favorite Excerpt:

"At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men's sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things and there is nothing else like it. Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one...Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but forever."

- from The Brothers Karamazov

Famous Works:

Notes from Unerground (1864)

Crime and Punishment (1866)

The Gambler (1867)

The Idiot (1869)

Demons (1872)

The Brothers Karamazov (1881)

Links:

· http://www.fyodordostoevsky.com/

· http://www.fmdostoyevsky.com/

· http://www.kiosek.com/dostoevsky/contents.html

This countdown is finished!

2. Albert Camus

(Image: http://www.enjoyfrance.com/images/stories/france/news/Albert-Camus-remains.jpg)

Born in 1913, Albert Camus was a French Algerian writer and philosopher. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, so you know he’s good. He is famous for exploring the world from an atheistic existential view in his stories. If there is God and nothing greater than our physical existence, then the nature of the universe is absurd. In other words, it does not matter to matter. There is no intrinsic meaning. The answer for man, then, is to face the absurdity. We must create our own meaning. Each man is the supreme author of his own life. The universe is indifferent. Our reality is filled with pain, suffering, anguish, and ultimately death, and Camus wonders how anyone can associate that with a loving God.

I certainly do not agree with Camus’s worldview as a whole, but I love reading him because he makes some great points and explores relevant themes in his writings. His stories can be depressing but liberating at the same time. I also like comparing his brand of atheistic existentialism to Kierkegaard’s brand of Christian existentialism. Rather than attempting to create idiosyncratic meaning, Kierkegaard urges that man must face the absurd by taking a leap of faith to God. The earth’s degenerate existence is the result of separation from God, and we must trust in Christ for restoration. Camus is important to me because he presents the other side of the argument.

Favorite Excerpt:

“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”

- from The Stranger

Famous Works:

The Stranger (1942)

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The Plague (1947)

The Fall (1956)

Exile and the Kingdom (1957)

Links:

· http://www.camus-society.com/

· http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/camus.shtml

·

http://www.levity.com/corduroy/camus.htm http://www.levity.com/corduroy/camus.htm

Next Week: #1.

Hint: He isn't Danish, British, American, or French.

3. Rob Bell

(Image: http://apprising.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Rob-Bell.jpg)

Doesn’t he look nice?

Rob Bell was born in 1970 and is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is incredibly fresh, but what I like most is that he is a great teacher (see favorite excerpt section). Watch this video: https://www.robbell.com/resurrection/. He’s compelling and makes you think about faith in new ways, but he does so by returning to its roots. He explains his church and writings in this way: “This is not just the same old message with new methods. We're rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life. Legal metaphors for faith don't deliver a way of life. We grew up in churches where people knew the nine verses why we don't speak in tongues, but had never experienced the overwhelming presence of God.”

He’s a bit divisive because he isn’t content with a lot of the old ways of thinking and doing things. He writes on the topics of suffering and its relationship to creativity, sex, and modern Christian culture. His teachings are refreshing, because he’s always pushing you deeper into your faith to more closely examine and experience it. His style is a little bit hip, but his writings are not about some pop culture, guru spirituality – it’s about authentic spirituality. For him, Christianity and church is a place of forgiveness, mystery, community, and transformation. Nice. It’s Christianity for the twenty-first century, and Bell asserts that repainting the faith throughout the centuries is essential.

A Favorite Excerpt:

“The tzitzit (seet-see) first appear in Numbers 15 when God says to Moses, ‘Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands.’

God tells his people to attach tassels to the corners of their garments so they will be constantly visually reminded to live as he created them to live.

The word in Hebrew here for ‘corners’ is kanaf.

The word for ‘tassel’ (or ‘fringe’) is tzitzit.

To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible. One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi’s prediction about the coming Messiah: ‘The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.’

The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf – the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached. So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.

Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her. She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs his cloak. Now remember, Jesus is a Torah-observant Jewish rabbi who keeps the Scripture commandments word for word, including passages like Numbers 15, which means Jesus would have been wearing a prayer shawl. So when the woman grabs the edge of his cloak, she is demonstrating that she believes Jesus is the Messiah and that his tassels have healing powers. She believes that Jesus is who Malachi was talking about.

If you were in a crowd, what would you think about this woman? This woman believes that this man is the Messiah.

She touches his tassels and is healed, just like Malachi said.

But I don’t think the physical healing is Jesus’ point here. I think it is what Jesus says to her as they part ways.

He says to her, ‘Go in peace.’

The word Jesus would have used for peace is the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is an important word in the Bible, and it is not completely accurate to translate it simply as ‘peace.’

For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. We talk about peace in the home or in the world or giving peace a chance. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more than just the absence of conflict.

Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.

So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is places the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God’s presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul – it involves all of you.

God’s desire is for us to live in harmony with him – body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions – every inch of our being.”

- from Velvet Elvis

Famous Works:

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (2005)

Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile (2008)

Drops Like Stars (2009)

Links:

· https://www.robbell.com/

· http://marshill.org/

· https://www.robbell.com/

Next Week: #2.

Hint: He's French.

4. Henry David Thoreau

(Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj64ZUmo9SnVgKiVqZtxftiGRjVwfan_LQXIPQ7EP_Vyst2lbXH_s_PZvj2d4i1J55BaY_oN4LKT-U0lYCVkvU1LCfjIPfDsyHylvZkj44s0UAGuAqNxqnjyTxWbc0SM5V80nNtoc4cW8c/s400/Henry+David+Thoreau.jpg)

How fantastic is Thoreau? Although he was writing about 150 years ago, his works are filled with insights that speak acutely into our twenty first-century lives.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. His most famous work is Walden, and it is one of the greatest books of American literature. I think there’s a deep impulse in a lot of us to reject society to rediscover the simple life and regain a spiritual vision. He saw that me were turning into capitalistic slaves of a system, and America had essentially created a society of dead men walking. Encouraging us to live deeply, he lived what he taught. He’s legit. And raw. And real. He wanted to truly live, and while he was perhaps a little extreme, desperate times call for desperate measures. I can appreciate any outside-the-box thinker. He’s ultimately full of insight and inspiration. What more can you ask for?

Favorite Excerpts:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…”

“How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity. I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

- from Walden

Famous Works:

Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849)

Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

Walden (1854)

Links:

· http://www.thoreausociety.org/

· http://www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/

· http://www.walden.org/Library

· http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/

Next Week: #3.

Hint: He currently pastors a church in Michigan.

5. C.S. Lewis

(Image: http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2005/12/13/Lewis_051213025205368_wideweb__300x414.jpg)

I’ve never read The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m just throwing it out there now. How can he be in my top five favorite writers if I’ve never read what he is most famous for? Sure, he wrote children’s fantasy fiction, but his writing career included a much wider scope than one genre.

Born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland, Lewis was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, and Christian apologist. He wrote prolifically in all categories. It’s amazing that he could write the celebrated A Preface to Paradise Lost and the cherished Chronicles. That’s quite a spectrum and to do it so well is incredible. My favorite of his writings are at once scholarly and intellectual and heartfelt and accessible. His book The Problem of Pain compelling seeks to answer the question of why humanity suffers, and his later book A Grief Observed contains his reactions to the same questions directly after his wife had died. His novels The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters are insanely innovative and thought-provoking. Mere Christianity is a classic. His writings seem like they come from both a World War II era Oxford professor and a compassionate, straightforward lay theologian. There’s no one quite like him. This little blurb seems so insufficient, but it’s hard putting the joy that I take from reading his works into words. I’ll borrow what someone else said: “I love… what he has taught me about life, Christianity, nature, beauty, and many other things.”

A Favorite Excerpt:

“‘That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.’

- from The Great Divorce

Famous Works:

The Problem of Pain (1940)

The Screwtape Letters (1942)

The Great Divorce (1945)

The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956)

Mere Christianity (1952)

A Grief Observed (1961)

Links:

· http://www.lewissociety.org/

· http://www.cslewis.org/

· http://www.cslewis.com/

Next Week: #4.

Hint: He's an American Transcendentalist.

6. T.S. Eliot

(Image: http://someblindalleys.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/eliot2.jpg)

I had to have a poet on the countdown, and Eliot edged out William Blake.

Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 but moved to England at the age of 26. He became an English citizen at 39. His poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men” embody the modernist movement. His ability to communicate the fragmentary, degenerative, disillusioned, and disjointed condition of modern culture is incredible. Throughout his poetry, there is a multitude of great lines, fantastic imagery, and rich symbolism.

His poetry after his conversion to Christianity is also very, very good. “Ash Wednesday” and “Journey of the Magi” are my two favorites. He considered “Four Quartets” his masterpiece, as it combines Christianity sensibility with the uncertainty of post-war Europe. His essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is huge in the realm of literary criticism. The ideas, techniques, and content of his poetry or prose are among the most creative, innovative, and original of the twentieth century. He certainly never compromised for anything or anyone. I like his poetry because it’s extremely heavy stuff. It all appeals to both head and heart, which is what good poetry should do. He combines intellect, aesthetic, and emotion all while drawing from the past, examining the present, and looking to the future. Awesome.

A Favorite Excerpt:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

- from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Famous Works:

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

The Waste Land (1922)

"The Hollow Men" (1925)

"Ash Wednesday" (1930)

Links

· http://www.luc.edu/eliot/

· http://www.whatthethundersaid.org/

· http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/eliot.htm

Next Week: #5.

Hint: He's a medievalist scholar and writer of children's fantasy fiction.

7. Søren Kierkegaard

(Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kierkegaard.jpg)

Don’t worry – this is certainly my most pretentious selection of the countdown.

Born in Denmark in 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. I like him because he really tries to cut through a lot of the crap of institutional Christianity – among other things, he’s famous for criticizing the Danish National Church. He elevates and experience and feeling over pure, cold rationality. This is because Christianity is filled with paradoxes, and he would have agreed with the second-century Christian writer Tertullian’s dictum “Credo quia absurdum” – “I believe because it is absurd.” He argues that truth must answer the questions of human existence, because good, sound theology (reason) will not get you there. Truth is discovered by those who are struggling and suffering their way to understanding life. He emphasizes struggle: without despair created through our failures, we would not be ready to make the desperate “leap of faith” of accepting Christianity. His brand of faith is intensely personal for the believer. He opposed the Christian institutions, because they typically produced mindless, cookie-cutter crowds instead of promoting an idiosyncratic encounter with God.

He was just so innovative in his thinking. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that he was “by far the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century.” His writing appeals to the academic side of me. His writing is extremely difficult, but sometimes that’s a good thing.

Favorite Excerpt:

“Just as the physician might say that there lives perhaps not one single man who is in perfect health, so one might say perhaps that there lives not one single man who after all is not to some extent in despair, in whose inmost parts there does not dwell a disquietude, a perturbation, a discord, an anxious dread of an unknown something, or of a something he does not even dare to make acquaintance with, dread of a possibility of life, or dread of himself, so that, after all, as physicians speak of a man going about with a disease in him, this man is going about and carrying a sickness of the spirit, which only rarely and in glimpses, by and with a dread which to him is inexplicable, gives evidence of its presence within…

This view will doubtless seem to many a paradox, an exaggeration, and a gloomy and depressing view at that. Yet it is nothing of the sort. It is not gloomy; on the contrary, it seeks to throw light upon a subject which ordinarily is left in obscurity. It is not depressing; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man in the aspect of the highest demand made upon him, that he be spirit.”

- from The Sickness Unto Death

Famous Works:

Either/Or (1834)

Fear and Trembling (1843)

Works of Love (1847)

The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

Links:

· http://sorenkierkegaard.org/

· http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/kierkegaard.shtml

· http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/

Next Week: #6.

Hint: He's a modernist poet.

The Countdown

As a general rule, I love countdowns. It could be anything from the best music videos of the 90s to 10 daily choices with global impact. They're simply fun and they get you hooked. Here's an example: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/441358-top-10-nba-player-highlght-reels-on-youtube-videos#page/1.

If I was to have a blog, I would pick a topic and weekly post my choices in a hierarchical order. After I got to #1, I would start a new topic. After trying to think of topic ideas, I have decided to do my favorite writers. I'll include background info, images, links, excerpts, why I like them, etc. It will be informative to others and help me to research and reflect on something that's a huge part of my life. I will reveal someone new every week until I get to my absolute favorite during the last week of class.

Next week: #7.

Hint: He's Danish.