The Road

The Road for me represented a time in one's life that everyone experiences, a depressing, hopeless time in which it appears that you will never get out of the rut that you are in. The whole depressive air of The Road was plagued by the father and son couple wondering if they would find enough food and water, escape being murdered by foes, and even live. All the while on their journey to the coast they questioned if there was a God. Their lives are makred by constant, unending violence and fear, and a sense of being lost forever.

The father and son encounter many people, and none of these encounters bring happiness. The father often remakrs to the son that he prays that they will make it to the coast, or survive another frigid night. In the end, the father dies and the son is invited to travel with the first family that has showed kindness to others in this barren apocalyptic land. In this last desperate attempt to find God and believe again, the son is given another opportunity at life.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

One specific part of Portrait comes to mind when thinking of religion. When Stephen is listening to a lecture about hell, including many images similar to Dante's Inferno, his fear is heightened due to the graphic images of hell that the preacher conveys. Stephen then proceeds to have his own dream about hell, a much more vivid and personal experience. Stephen realizes that he is doomed to hell, a physical and spiritual torture. I think this is one of the most important ideas, even today; people should not be afraid of their religion, they should do things, such as living a moral life, because they want to, not because they are afraid of being doomed to some idealistic, torturous place.

Stephen also endures many struggles between choosing religion and choosing women. He gets with a prostitue and then later feels guilty and dedicates his life to the church. He realizes that he cannot be a priest and has an epiphany when he sees a girl in the ocean. Stephen understands that he should not ignore his sensuality, it is a natural part of human life.

While we may not all grow into artists like Stephen does, the important message in this book pertaining to my big question is to find a happy medium where you are doing what you like because you want to do it. Whether its womanizing or being a priest, you must do what makes you happy and not fear consequences.

Pop Culture

Strauss often remarked that although politics can address finite problems it can never resolve the fundamental contradictions of life. Those contradictions have their source in the human need to answer the existential question "How should I live?," a supra-political question giving rise to stark alternatives. In the West, those alternatives were seen in philosophy and divine revelation, the lives of Socrates and Moses. The tension between them was, in Strauss's view, the hidden wellspring of our civilization's vitality. But the thinkers of the modern Enlightenment, horrified by religious war and frustrated by the other-worldliness of classical philosophy, tried to reduce that tension. They mocked religion, advocated toleration, and tried to redirect philosophy toward more practical pursuits, whether political, technological, or moral. They imagined a world of satisfied citizens and shopkeepers, and nearly succeeded in creating it. But as the nineteenth century progressed it became abundantly clear that one problem, the "Jewish question," could not be dissolved. Not because of Christian prejudice, which was real enough, or Jewish stubbornness, but because the existence of the Jews as a people constituted by di-vine revelation was a challenge to the Enlightenment's hope that politics could be isolated from supra-political claims. The principle leading to emancipation—that, to quote from the debate in the French National Assembly of 1789, "the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals"—proved untenable; the call of revelation could not be extinguished from thought or politics. And that, for Strauss, meant that philosophy needed to reconsider the original "theological-political problem" afresh.

I found this in an article Does Society Need God?

Crime and Punishment

Throughout Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, religious morality governs the actions of many characters such as Sonia, Dounia and Raskolnikov's mother. Raskolnikov confronts the idea of being an "extraordinary man" and being able to overcome God's will to commit a sin that he justifies by persisting that it's for the better of society. On the contrary, Dounia and his mother live self-less lives in their pursuit of morality through religion. Even Sonia, the prostitue, is able to overcome the sin her immoral career and read to Raskolnikov from the bible. The Christian religion manages to keep some citizens moral, while posing a challenge for other citizens to overcome its lingering grasp of morality.

Dounia and her mother rely on God to confirm their beliefs, "People will write anything. We were talked about and written about, too. Have you forgotten? I am sure that she is a good girl, an dthat it is all nonsense. God grant it may be!" (pg 210)

Sonia defines Raskolnikov's belief in God and at the end, it is his brief sighting of her that motivates him to confess, "She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a minute, grinned and went back to the police office." (457)