A Neighbor's Choice by David Gornoski

The infamous chapter of “the Grand Inquisitor” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” is rightfully praised as one of the great literary deconstructions of coercive institutional power. Ivan Karamazov’s parable presents a terrifying possibility: that human beings, unable to bear the freedom Christ gives them, will eventually prefer an institution that relieves them o...

In the world of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, grace rarely arrives in comfortable form; most often it arrive through humiliation, suffering, and grotesque moments in which a person’s carefully constructed understanding of himself is suddenly deconstructed and exposed as a lie. Few of her stories demonstrate this more powerfully than “Revelation,” first published in 1964, th...