Reddit mentions of The Orthodox Way

Greetings fellow NorCalian! Continuing to attend the services is a great way to learn more. This next week is an especially good time as it’s Holy Week. Most parishes will have numerous services leading up to the grand finale on Saturday night for Pascha (Easter) (ours falls on a different day most years because we follow the Julian calendar dating). It’s a truly beautiful and unparalleled service and I’d highly recommend it if you can make it. Wear comfy shoes!

There’s a lot of great books out there as well. Check out the sidebar for some recommendations. A personal favorite for me (that I’ve read multiple times) is “The Orthodox Way”.

The Orthodox church features heavily in the Brothers Karmazov and there are a lot of great books about it.

The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware is an overview of their practices and beliefs and how they affect life as a whole. It references the Brothers K a lot, especially the life of Father Zosima. The themes of Dostoyevsky are fundamentally rooted in Orthodox tradition. This book takes those same ideas and goes much deeper into them. The same author has another book on the history of the church that is pretty good too.

Everyday Saints was a recent nonfiction bestseller in Russia about monastics living under soviet occupation. It's beautifully written. It reminded me a lot of Brothers K. It's a sprawl of Russians balancing drama with weighty religious themes.

But neither of those are in the literary cannon. For classic literature with similar themes I'd highly reccomend Moby Dick. The book is so famous that people forget how good it is. It's one of the greatest works of American Literature ever. The prose is a massive step up from translations of Dostoevsky while covering the same themes as Brothers K just as deeply.

Also, if you like Brothers K you'll like all his other works. Notes from Underground is my favorite and very short. But they're all good. Tolstoy is great too and has much better prose if you're down to read another giant book. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are both solid members of the cannon.

Shakespeare's plays might be too short to count but all his works cover the same themes too.

Check out "The Orthodox Way" by Kallistos Ware