Rather a long hiatus, that–crazy summer + technical problems = dead blog. Oh, well . . . life here in the mountains is settling back into winter calm (which might seem odd, but outside the ski towns it really is pretty quiet up here once Labor Day passes), and we have time to think again.
One of my aims this winter is to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel–I started the first book, August 1914, years ago but was sidetracked before getting very far. It may seem like an odd ambition, but I was spurred to it by Daniel Mahoney’s recent piece in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” which is a brief consideration of the various ways in which Solzhenitsyn has been misrepresented and slandered in the West. It’s no surprise, really; he’s a true prophetic voice, and the established order doesn’t like prophets much. It never has. (Though if you listen to debates in the mainline churches, you’ll hear a fair number of people claiming the prophetic mantle for themselves–usually followed by yet another spiel as to why God supports the Democratic Party agenda. Funny, that.)