Wednesday, April 7, 2021
4 p.m.
Online webinar via Zoom
This Zoom webinar is a book talk sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center with support from the North American Dostoevsky Society and the Fordham Russian Forum. It is a part of the 2020-21 North American Dostoevsky Society Bicentennial Speaker Series.
The author Paul J. Contino joins two Fordham panelists, Professor Emeritus Terrence W. Tilley and MLL Russian Program Director Michael Ossorgin, to discuss his brilliant book, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ Among the Karamazovs (2020). “In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha's mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility ‘to all, for all’ develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader's guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a ‘monk in the world,’ and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha's brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya's struggle to become a ‘new man’ and Ivan's anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha's generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.” (Cascade Books)
Our guest of honor is Paul J. Contino, Professor of Great Books at Seaver College, Pepperdine University. He is the author of the book under discussion: Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ Among the Karamazovs, with an Afterword by Caryl Emerson, published by Cascade Books (2020). He is also co-editor of Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith edited and introduced with Susan Felch, Northwestern University Press (2001).
Attendees of this event can purchase Paul's book half-price with the code CONTINO50 here.
Panelists
Terrence W. Tilley (Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley) is Professor Emeritus of Theology at Fordham. He taught previously at the University of Dayton, Florida State University, St. Michael's College (Vermont), and Georgetown University. He edited three books, authored ten books, scores of academic articles and chapters, and over 100 book reviews. For more than twenty years, at least biennially, he taught a graduate seminar on the problem of evil and read The Brothers Karamazov with colleagues and graduate students as part of those seminars. His most recent article is "The Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World---And in Ours," Theological Studies 81/4 (December, 2020), in press. He received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 2012. He was elected president of the CTSA, the College Theology Society, and the Society for Philosophy of Religion.
Michael Ossorgin (Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University) teaches Russian and comparative literature, art, theology, and language courses at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He has published articles on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Notes From the Dead House. He is currently writing a book about the role of vision in Dostoevsky’s poetics, including individual chapters on Smerdiakov and Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov. He is grateful for the OCSC grants to design and teach OCSC credited courses including, “The Apocalypse: Russian and American Visions” and “The Russian Icon in Dialogue with the Arts.” He is currently teaching a comparative course, “Dostoevsky and Race in America,” and will begin teaching the first of three summer courses in The Great Russian Minds Series this June (2021) on Mikhail Bakhtin, made possible with a grant from The Orthodox Christian Studies Center. Ossorgin is a member of the Dostoevsky Readers Advisory Board of the North American Dostoevsky Society.
This event is sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center with support from the North American Dostoevsky Society and the Fordham Russian Forum.
Orthodox Christian Studies Center events are free and open to the public.