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On a recent Friday evening, students at 91����, California, braved the night’s tumultuous windstorm for the much-anticipated All-College Seminar. Occurring once a semester, the Seminar combines students from every class into sections of about 20 students to discuss a common text. Members of the faculty pair up to teach the sections in tandem. 

The night’s reading was a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Dream of A Ridiculous Man.” The story follows the narrator, who, fed up with his endless problems and burdened by an overwhelming feeling of indifference, decides to end his own life. Yet, an influential interaction with a young girl asking for help penetrates his apathy and sparks a question that causes him to delay the bullet. He falls asleep and has a dream of an Edenic planet, inhabited by man before the Fall. Men on this planet are happy, joyful, and completely innocent. However, the narrator cannot live as a fallen man among these perfect ones and inevitably corrupts them. This dream radically changes the narrator’s perspective on life and, upon awakening, spurs a resolve to preach his revelation to others: The natural state of man is one of goodness, not evil. 

Over the course of the evening, sections discussed a variety of questions, including: Was the narrator’s corruption of the Edenic planet intentional? What about his interaction with the little girl caused him not to kill himself? Why does the narrator seemingly love the inhabitants of the Edenic planet more after the Fall and subsequent corruption? Was the narrator actually a ridiculous man?

Following the seminar, all rushed to St. Joseph Commons, where discussions continued over pizza. Basil Gutch (’28) commented enthusiastically on the story, one of his favorites. “Dostoevsky is pleading with his readers to embrace love, to embrace suffering, to will the good of others,” he shared. “He is pleading for us to be ridiculous in the same way that Jesus hanging on the Cross is ridiculous. This book must be read and understood by any serious intellectual who is also serious about being a saint.”