The collection of journalism by Andrei Desnitsky contains seventy short articles on a variety of topics, from the Christian faith to Russian politics and public life. Desnitsky's publications are well known to those who visit the sites "Orthodoxy and the World", "Neskuchny Garden", "Foma", "Russian Journal", etc. This collection can be considered a continuation of his second collection, "People and Phrases", published by the publishing house "Nicaea".

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Andrey Desnitsky

IN SEARCH OF MEANING

(collection)

From the author

This collection includes seventy articles that were published in 2010-2012 in various publications (mainly online): "Orthodoxy and the World", "Neskuchny Garden", "Thomas", "Russian Journal", "Tatiana's Day", as well as on the website of the Church of St. St. John on Presnya. Some of them have been edited because a book publication is always a little different from a magazine publication, even if both are electronic.

But most importantly, they were put together, and I hope the reader will agree: they were not collected randomly. The genre of this book is Christian journalism. In other words, these are reflections on different topics and on different occasions, they are united by the desire to find meaning, and to find it on the path of the Christian faith. This is not a conversation about the peculiarities of church life (how to pray and fast), not a sermon or a theological treatise, although in some articles there will be a little bit of the first, second, and third. But these are primarily personal reflections. The reader can agree with them or not, but if he thinks about these questions, if he tries to find his own answer to them, then he has not read this book in vain.

The book has five sections. The title of the first "I believe" speaks for itself. But this is not an exposition of dogmas, not an explanation of liturgical texts, but a conversation about Orthodox Christianity here and now: what it can be, what it gives to our contemporaries, and what questions it poses to them. The articles in the second section, "In Private," talk about personal things, about something that is usually discussed by two or three friends, and the third section, "The Planet of People," is devoted to social problems, primarily to current Russian life. The fourth section, "In the Squares", could have been part of it, but it is still highlighted as too "hot" and specific, including articles written in the winter and early spring of 2012 during the elections and everything that followed. Finally, the fifth section, "The Present Past," contains reflections on those pages of history (from biblical to modern) that remain relevant today. At the same time, there are no articles on biblical studies (my main specialty) here, they were included in another book, "Forty Questions about the Bible".

What else can I say? Read to your heart's content! And if you want to send feedback, you can do it at a.desnitsky@gmail.com.

Believe

1. In Search of Meaning

There was such a person - Viktor Frankl. He studied psychology with Sigmund Freud himself, practiced as a psychoanalyst - and during World War II he ended up in a Nazi concentration camp. He managed to survive, and he wrote several books about it. The most famous of them is called "Man in Search of Meaning". In the concentration camp, the prisoners experienced a lot of torment, but the most terrible thing was not hunger, beatings, cold and humiliation - but the meaninglessness of everything that was happening. Soldiers in the trenches were just as malnourished, frozen, subjected to cruel and not always reasonable discipline, and finally dying of wounds - but they understood that this was the price of victory over the enemy. Prisoners suffered without any rational purpose, and meaninglessness became the most terrible torture for them.