I was convinced to look more closely into Orthodoxy for three reasons:

1. The Beauty and Naturalness of the Liturgy, Art, and Holy Days.

The Orthodox Church strives for timeless, transcendent beauty in it's liturgy and art; while all too often Protestant churches strive for mere fashionability.

Add in the feasts and fasts, and Christianity easily becomes part of the natural tempo of life, rather than simply being for Sundays, Easter, and Christmas, with the other 312 days of the year dedicated to secularism.

Of course this is not an exclusively Orthodox virtue--it's shared to at least a certain extent with Lutherans, High-Church Anglicans, and the Roman Catholics; in fact a Catholic blogger (John C. Wright) was a major influence on me in this area, but it is something sadly lacking from the Evangelical traditions.

Reading more about the "High-Church" traditions left me feeling that there was something missing from the churches of my childhood, which started my journey towards Orthodoxy.

2. Authority versus Radical Individualism.

Protestantism has embraced a form of radical individualism in it's attitude towards truth, doctrine, and morals. But if we must each come to our own conclusions about the tough questions that leaves only two possibilities:

1. Universal direct Spiritual guidance, aka: everyone's a prophet. But those people who do claim such a gift of prophecy are often the most contradictory to each other and to mainline Protestantism.

2. Each man follows his own intellectual reasoning. But, forgive me for being a little arrogant here: I'm am very, very intelligent, and enjoy reading moral and philosophical works; if independent reasoning is the important factor, then I should have been closer to the truth than nearly everyone, but an honest appraisal of my own thoughts and history shows that it took me years to figure out fairly basic questions. One man alone, no matter how smart, can not develop a full system of Christian morals and doctrines by himself.

If neither universal prophecy nor independent reasoning can lead us to the truth, or at least not to anything approaching the full truth, then the question is not "what opinions to hold", but rather "what authority or authorities can I trust to inform and shape my opinions".

3. Standing Against Political Correctness.

In reading various writers on social subjects, while many writers from all parts of Christianity and beyond held views I could agree with, I found myself agreeing with writers from a relatively little known faith tradition far more often than I would have expected. (In particular I should mention David Scott Klajic who writes at American Dad, but he was far from alone)

I found myself wondering why both clergy and laymen, of this relatively small and little-known [in the west] sect was so over-represented among Christians who actually where willing to take a stand against the abuses of Political Correctness. Perhaps this was the Church that had a rightful claim to authority?

Conclusion

There where various other issues I've looked at over the last year or two--the Bishop of Rome, Church History, Ecumenical Councils, Sola Scriptura, etc.--but these three factors are what originally got me through the door of my local parish a year and a half ago, and laid the foundation of my decision to convert last week.

Volume 7 is The Confessions of St. Augustine and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, both of which I acquired in hard copy.

The Confessions is pretty much what you'd expect; it's the story of St. Augustine's life from his birth to shortly after his conversion from Manichaesm into Christianity, as well as a couple of of bonus chapters on the subject of Creation and Genesis.

I used a relatively old translation by E. B. Pusey, which was somewhat dry and tiring to read unfortunately, but it was still well worth reading. At some point I think I'll try to track down The City of God and read that as well.

The Imitation of Christ is essentially a series of notes on how to live for young monastics. Many parts of it are still applicable to non-monastics, but that was the intended audience of Brother Thomas, and it shows through on occasion.

I used the fairly modern translation by William C. Creasy, which I think may have been a mistake. He favoured a very simplified style of language, which suffered the failing of many "simply" translations of complex works: it's often rather ugly, and reading ugly prose is tiring in it's own way.

As well as that according to his introduction he deliberately set out to translate it in a manner compatible with modern post-Vatican II Catholic theology; he claimed in the Introduction that he only did so to the extent necessary to make up for the modern lack of understanding of the context to which Brother Thomas would have been writing, but I as a reader am left not knowing what he might have changed.

He gives this example in the introduction of how he changed the translation of one particular sentence. Early in the book Brother Thomas says "This is the highest wisdom: through contempt of the world to aspire to the kingdom of heaven." which apparently and "informed reader" would understand as (and Creasy translates as) "This is the highest wisdom: to see the world as it truly is, fallen and fleeting; to love the world not for its own sake, but for God's; and to direct all your effort toward achieving the kingdom of heaven."

This may be a reasonable opinion as to what an "informed reader" would get out of that passage, but it is just Creasy's opinion. Essentially we're viewing the work through the lens of Creasy's personal theology and understanding of medieval philosophy.

Moving on from the questions about the translation, I found Book 4: The Book of the Sacrament the most interesting. It showed a different, and far more serious attitude towards communion than I am used to from the more easy-going Protestantism I grew up with. And an attitude I find myself starting to move towards more and more.

Volume 8 is various ancient Greek plays. I modified the list a little based on what I had print copies of, but I ended up reading:

• Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus; I forget which translation
• Hecabe, Electra, and Heracles by Euripides and translated by Philip Vellacott, which I had in hard-copy
• The Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles and translated by F. Storr
• The Acharnians, The Clouds, and Lysistrata by Aristophanes and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein, also in hard-copy

Seven against Thebes was the dullest of the plays, and covered some of the same events as the Oedipus Trilogy. It appears that I didn't even keep a copy of the ebook. It probably was not the best choice for a singly play of Aeschylus, but it's what I ended up with.

The tragedies of Euripides where a step up, but really there's not much to say about them. They where entertaining, and worth reading for the window into a different world, and different world-view they offer though.

The Oedipus Trilogy, AKA the Theban Plays, is actually three unrelated plays by the same playwright (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone), which where not intended as a trilogy, but are often combined since they deal with the same characters, and the later two are very definitely dealing with the carry-on effects of the first. I'd say these where my favourite of the Greek theatre that I have read, and Antigone is probably my favourite of the three. If you're only going to read a little bit of Greek theatre go with these ones.

The Comedies of Aristophanes I didn't like as much as the tragedies, interestingly my favourite was The Clouds, which is the most tragic of the three.

The most interesting observation to come out of these was how much of what would be considered gross-out humour in modern times they had. Fart-jokes, poop-jokes, and sex-jokes all abound; Lysistrata has two groups of old folk (one of men and one of women) have a battle-of-the-sexes in song, in which their genitalia feature heavily, any stage directions in the plays are apparently guesses from modern scholars, but I'm pretty sure it's generally accepted that at least the old men strip off during the song, perhaps the old women as well.

My dislike of such humour quite probably contributed to my poor opinion of these plays, so people who like that sort of humour may find them more entertaining.

The fourth volume of the Harvard Classics consists of the collected poetry of Milton. I read this in three separate volumes: Minor Poems (I commend this edition due to it's extensive and well linked footnotes), Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.

There's not much to say about these; having read them I can see why Milton is considered to be one of the greatest English authors of all time, even if for myself I lack the taste for poetry and knowledge of the many allusions he makes to truly appreciate them to their full.

I did appreciate seeing a different view on the common Bible stories that Milton was retelling though; both the fact that he essentially interpreted the regaining of Paradise to have happened during Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness rather than on the cross, and that his interpretation of the first sin, and the relationship to Adam, Eve, and authority in inter-sexual relationships was very foreign to most modern eyes.

We're now moving on to Emerson; I've actually started already, and so far I'm not a fan of the Essays (though I'll reserve judgement until I've read a bit more), but English Traits sounds rather interesting.

There are essentially four possibilities as to who Jesus was based on these documents: Legend, or these account are heavily if not entirely fictionalized; Liar, or Jesus was a masterful Charlatan, perhaps with some form of demonic or magical power; Lunatic, Jesus was insane; or Lord, Jesus is the rightful Lord and ruler of your life. Essentially Jesus of Nazareth must be one of these four things, or some combination thereof. Now lets examine each of these in order:

Legend

Now this one is the most popular and consists of two main variants. First, Jesus did not exist at all, which doesn't make sense from a historic perspective, the shear quantity of documentation about him proves, as near as can be done with any historic figure, that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Now of course the more popular form is almost definitely that Jesus did exist, but that is no more reliable most scholars place the original authorship of the New Testament within the life span of the people who actually met Jesus. Just imagine if a bunch of Martin Luther King's supporters started to make those sort of claims about him today. It doesn't make sense.

Liar

Basically this requires Jesus to have been such an expert liar that he actually managed to convince a large number of people that he rose people from the dead, several times, and even feed thousands of people magically, again several times. Managing to trick people into believing in these miracles is a miracle in and of itself. And then of course there's the little question of how many liars are willing to die for their lies?

Lunatic

Of course he might still be crazy, except of course that the thousands of people who met him in his life appear not to have thought so, after all they where apparently quite impressed with him, so much so that leaders in society came to him for help on several occasions. Also crazy doesn't grant the power to perform miracles as far as I know.

Lord

And that leaves our third and final possibility. So, who do you think Jesus was?