SAVE THE DATE!

Dr. Elise Lonich Ryan (Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh) will give our annual All Fellows Seminar on the Problem of Evil, taking as her subject The Brothers Karamazov.

This sounds like the start of a bad joke. And—in some ways—it is, for The Brothers Karamazov is an absurdist comedy in which the laughable, the bizarre, the horrible, and the beautiful combine to build a map across the terrain of the human heart.

My talk constellates my own 20-year journey alongside this novel with responses from other readers of Dostoevsky. The starlight image I hope to show and to offer is that the gift of time to build a relationship with language and with story offers a path through the problem of evil and into joy and the love of life from “your insides . . . before logic” capable of “resurrecting your dead.”