He called Stalin “the man with a moustache” and paid dearly for it. But the man would struggle on through a series of imprisonments, intimidations, censures and personal crises over a span of many decades with an uncompromising integrity very few of his contemporaries could claim as their own. His courage gave the 20th century a voice of dissent yet unmatched – one that singularly confronted the horrors of Soviet Communism with a literary account that was at once haunting as it was eloquent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 89, stood in the best Russian literary tradition that counts Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as some of its illustrious forbears.
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Having attended an Anglican Church in Amsterdam that was decidedly evangelical in orientation, I have developed a certain fondness for the Anglo-Catholic tradition. My brief but treasured encounter with Anglicanism has given me a fresh appreciation for ritual, tradition and liturgy that my broader evangelical upbringing sorely lacked. Perhaps I can say that in the Anglican community I discovered in Amsterdam, I saw that the fusion of evangelicalism (the stress on personal conversion and commitment to Christ) and Catholicism (the stress on continuity with tradition and creed) is in fact possible. The experience allowed me to view Roman Catholicism (the religion of my younger years) from a third perspective. Yet I have always wondered how evangelicals within an increasingly liberal church Communion as far as its North American brethren are concerned could choose to stay within its confines. Today, the Anglican Communion is struggling to keep the center from collapsing. It seems that it is only a matter of time before the dispute over issues of sexuality (read: ordination of homosexual bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions) rents the communion into an irreconcilable split.
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