Talking About God is Dangerous
Goricheva, Tatiana
Reading the accounts of life in a totalitarian society, you sometimes get the impression—in between bouts of terror—that it's all surrealistic madness. Armando Valladares in Against All Hope'...
...But many never got past that grim destination alive: suicide was rampant among the young intellectuals imbibing forbidden poisons from the West...
...residents please add 61/2% sales tax...
...What is happening now in the Soviet Union seems to validate Chesterton's comment thatwhen people depart from religious faith they don't thereby believe in nothing...
...He convincingly demonstrates that the economic principles of the late scholastic political philosophers prove surprisingly modem and presage the development of a free-market economy...
...266 + xxii pages...
...Everyone has his weakness, and the creatures of the regime are trained to exploit them all...
...T he doubter who smiles skeptically at this memoir of the revival of religion among Soviet intellectuals ought to choose as a companion volume The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, by Jane Ellis of Keston College in England...
...All the members of the Moscow seminar are in prison...
...Thus the occult flourishes in the Soviet Union...
...Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus made the rounds in translation, and for those who would later come to the church these philosophers provided a useful way station—despair...
...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Price Amount Hardcover $10.00 Paperback 4.50 Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total We pay book postage rate...
...The Leningrad seminar started meeting about that time, and, although at the core it was composed of Orthodox Christians, it also included atheists, cultists, a few Baptists—and a coterie of KGB agents...
...Name Address City State, Zip as 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 mind-to-mind combat with no holds barred, although the Soviet version must have been far more exhilarating for the participants because such events were illegal...
...Miss Goricheva is astonished to learn after emigrating that in the Soviet Union, where believers are hounded, tortured, and imprisoned, they are actually freer than in the West because of this inner strength developed through adversity...
...Rather than just moving in with handcuffs, the KGB may attack the living organism of dissent from within...
...In both cases believer and atheist slugged it out in TALKING ABOUT GOD IS DANGEROUS: THE DIARY OF A RUSSIAN DISSIDENT Tatiana Goricheva/Crossroad Publishing (New York, NY)/$11.95 Herbert Schlossberg I "An Outstanding Study'" Alejandro Chafuen' s brilliant and in-depth analysis of late scholastic economics is receiving wide acclaim...
...In place of the stereotype—the few remaining churches half-filled with ancient babushkas while the educated young feed on science and atheism—Miss Goricheva here gives an entirely different picture...
...They foresaw that the scientistic mania for the phenomenal which had captured the intellectual classes of their day would eventuate in a revolt against reason and the flowering of weird cults and noumenal fantasies...
...George M. Curtis, III is Professor of History at Hanover College and James J. Thompson, Jr., is Book Review Editor of The New Oxford Review...
...The KGB man responds mildly that that's the young woman's own business...
...When she reached the West, instead of being met by Christians, which she hoped for, she was greeted by air-headed feminists breathlessly asking if Russian women desired to be priests...
...7440 N. Shadeland, Dept U-101C Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 53...
...The Ellis work substantiates that Miss Goricheva was one of the founders of the Leningrad seminar—called the 37 Group, from the number of the apartment in which it met...
...Still, there is a subtlety to the Soviet method that is likely to get the better of those who think it is all truncheons and labor camps...
...That is starting to change, partly because of the maturity and volume of materials on the Soviet Union coming out of Keston College, and partly because of a number of small but increasingly vocal organizations calling attention to the suffering of the victims...
...Herbert Schlossberg is directing a project on worldwide religious persecution...
...A rare book that opens our eyes to new bodies of material and to an important revision of long-held views.'2— MICHAEL NOVAK Ignatius press 15 Oakland Aye, Harrison NY 10528 Please send me Christians for Freedom...
...rather, they believe in anything...
...Weaver's appreciation of civility, honor and liberty were rooted in his understanding of Southern history...
...By anti large people in the West are ignorant of the nature of religious persecution in totalitarian countries...
...Among the essays included are "Lee the Philosopher" (1948), "Agrarianism in Exile" (1950), "The Tennessee Agrarians" (1952), and "Two Types of Individualism" (1963...
...I enclose $12.95 plus $1 postage...
...Armando Valladares in Against All Hope' describes an event in which, exhausted and half-starved, Cuban political prisoners march so rapidly, with a kind of inhuman psychic energy, that their frantic guards cannot keep pace with them...
...Her scathing description of a television preacher-is only too familiar to Americans, and her sadness at the desiccated appearance of religious life in the West echoes all the lamentations about post-Christian Europe...
...Surprisingly, the title of the book refers not to the Soviet Union but to the scarecrows that pass for clergymen in the West, those who are afraid to talk about God to people who don't want to listen...
...In the scene with which Tatiana Goricheva opens these memoirs, the KGB officer who has come to take her away is being placated by Tatiana's mother, who is ashamed of her daughter and clucks nervously about how absurd it is for the girl—a philosopher speaking three languages—to be working as an elevator operator...
...Dissidents are threatened with "treatment" in psychiatric hospitals...
...All orders must be prepaid in U.S...
...The Mutt and Jeff act is still playing in the interrogation rooms...
...Name Address City/State/Zip Mail to: Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Yet the Soviet leaders have not suddenly turned soft or decided to honor their constitution...
...Quan...
...May we have an increase in this kind of literature...
...He discovered in his native land the evolution of a "social bond individualism" very different from the better known "anarchic individualism" of Thoreau...
...The secret police are just as swinish as Solzhenitsyn revealed them to be in The Oak and the Calf...
...LthertyPiess/LibertyClassics THE SOUTHERN ESSAYS OF l'ICHARD M. WEAVER Foreword by George Core Edited with Preface by George M. Curtis, III and James, J. Thompson, Jr...
...This seminar reminds me of the Socratic Club that C. S. Lewis founded at Oxford around the beginning of World War II and presided over until his departure for Cambridge in 1954...
...in fact Miss Goricheva was converted to Christianity in the midst of a Yoga session through the misguided inclusion of a New Testament passage for the mantra...
...Foreword, preface, acknowledgments, index...
...Chafuen proves beyond a doubt that the Scholastic writers were much more favorable to free markets than earlier writers led us to believe...
...Miss Goricheva ponders 'Reviewed by Vladimir Bukovsky in the December 1986 TAS...
...Miss Goricheva found that the disciplines of the ancient faith preserved her fortitude against the wiles of the enemy, and she quotes approvingly Solzhenitsyn's strategy for dealing with the authorities: "Believe nothing, be afraid of nothing, ask for nothing...
...ROBERT HESSEN * Hoover Institution "Abounds with brilliant aphorisms...
...This massive work, published last year by Indiana University Press, documents in great detail the revival of Russian Orthodoxy, of which Talking About God is Dangerous is an important source document...
...That such groups could continue in Soviet society is astonishing, given the energy with which the authorities repress unofficial thinking...
...They tell the Baptists that the Orthodox are drunkards and perverts...
...This collection of fourteen of Weaver's essays demonstrates George Core's point that "few critics of the South rival Richard Weaver in comprehensiveness of vision and depth of thought...
...Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963) was one of the leading figures in the post World War II development of an intellectual, self-conscious conservatism...
...Valladares's Against All Hope lifted the veil from the horror of Castro's Cuba, and now Tatiana Goricheva enables us to see more of the Soviet Union's beleaguered religious life...
...Calif...
...Solzhenitsyn, of course, made thebreakthrough, but his work was blunted partially by the complicity and disinformation .of the World Council of Churches and some of its member organizations...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...is based on the exploitation of the lower human feelings: anxiety, envy, vanity, mistrust...
...Here is a society in which, after seventy years of relentless religious persecution and the propagation of official atheism with all the organs of the state, the intellectuals —mirabile dictu—are turning to religious faith, and doing so with great courage and the determination not to allow the regime to manage them...
...The revival of religion among the intellectuals began in earnest in the mid-seventies...
...Their existence," says Miss Goricheva...
...Later on Miss Goricheva learned that a similar group functioned in Moscow, although it was composed entirely of members of the Russian Orthodox Church...
...This was in 1980 when the regime was trying to rid the country of troublemakers in time for the Olympics...
...Please send me a copy of your latest catalogue...
...To the Orthodox they speak of Baptist fanaticism...
...I have recently learned on good authority that numerous similar groups have sprung up in the Soviet Union since Miss Goricheva left...
...What is disquieting is the palpable disappointment its author felt with the spiritual life of Western Europe...
...The trend validates the predictions of both Oswald Spengler and Max Weber some seventy-five years ago...
...the significance of this scene: "Just imagine that, the KGB acting as my moral advocate...
...Gilbert Murray's interpretation of the degeneration of Hellenistic philosophy and society was essentially the same...
...Seeking something other than the gray aridity of official Marxist materialism and the madness of the cults, Miss Goricheva and her friends for a time sought solace in Western existentialism...
...One of the jokes making the rounds had it that on nights when the seminar was in session it was safe to have meetings anywhere you wanted because the KGB was fully occupied over at 37...
...Incongruities abound in Talking About God is Dangerous, and that's one reason it is so gripping...
...Yet following his untimely death his work, for the most part, faded from view, though his most important and widely cited book, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), still is in print...
...Hardcover $10.00 0-86597-057-2 Paperback $ 4.50 0-86597-058-0 Please send me: The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver Liberty Fund edition, 1987...
...dollars...
...She left the USSR because she had started a women's movement called Mary (the name was no coincidence), and the authorities gave her the choice of emigrating or going to prison...
...he disquieting part of this book is .1 not the life of Christians under persecution—that is the exhilarating part...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
