Fyodor Dostoevsky's highest and most permanent achievement as a novelist lies in his exploration of man's religious complex, his world and his fate. His primary vision is to be found in his last five novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazov. This volume culminates twenty years of studying, teaching, and writing on Dostoevsky. Here George A. Panichas critically analyzes the religious themes and meanings of the author's major works. Focusing on the pervasive spiritual consciousness at play, Panichas views Dostoevsky not as a religious doctrinaire, but as a visionary whose five great novels constitute a sequential meditation on man's human and superhuman destiny.

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.

Rowan Williams explores the intricacies of speech, fiction, metaphor, and iconography in the works of one of literature's most complex and most misunderstood, authors. Williams' investigation focuses on the four major novels of Dostoevsky's maturity (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov). He argues that understanding Dostoevsky's style and goals as a writer of fiction is inseparable from understanding his religious commitments. Any reader who enters the rich and insightful world of Williams' Dostoevsky will emerge a more thoughtful and appreciative reader for it.

This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems.

Catholics are not Christians. They worship Mary. They do whatever the pope says. They cannot divorce. They eat fish on Fridays. These flawed but common statements reflect a combined ignorance of and fascination with Catholicism and the Catholic Church. Catholicism Today: An Introduction to the Contemporary Catholic Church aims to familiarize its readers with contemporary Catholicism. The book is designed to address common misconceptions and frequently-asked questions regarding the Church, its teachings, and the lived experience of Catholics in modern societies worldwide. Opening with a concise historical overview of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, the text explores the core beliefs and rituals that define Catholicism in practice, the organization of the Church and the Catholic calendar, as well as the broad question of what it means to be Catholic in a variety of cultural contexts. The book ends with a discussion of the challenges facing the Church both now and in the coming decades. Also included are two short appendices on Eastern Catholicism and Catholicism in the United States.

'Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience' deals with the religious dimension of the novelist’s life and fiction. The book is structured through six clearly defined and self-reliant essays that take into account past and current criticism and offers a close textual analysis on Dostoevsky's works, including 'The Double', 'Notes from Underground', 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Devils' and an in-depth study of 'The Brothers Karamazov'.

The book is a substantial contribution to international Dostoevsky research, exploring Dostoevsky’s contemporary relevance from a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective. It offers some fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s texts, presenting new complex studies on the writer and his works in the mirror of several arts of the last three decades. The book is divided into three Parts, featuring researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine. Part One deals with conceptual issues, treating Dostoevsky above all as a prophet and philosopher, and thus determines the ideological system of coordinates for the studies presented in the rest of the book. Part Two examines Dostoevsky’s legacy through the lenses of literary theory, music, and Illustration art, and Part Three, via world cinema and theatre. The volume has gathered together an array of original and innovative studies from world leading experts in Dostoevsky’s creative universe, to make an authoritative input into the field.