For many Eastern Orthodox Christians, the Romanian priest Father Roman Braga has been a living Father Zossima, a radiant man cut from the cloth Dostoevsky tailored into Alyosha's spiritual guide in The Brothers Karamazov. Born in 1922 to free peasants in Moldavia, his life followed the upheavals of his country, from the “Burning Bush” spiritual revival of 1945–1948 and the Communist Revolution of 1947 to the horrors of Pitești Prison, the Communist reeducation experiment that Aleksandr Solzhenitzn called “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world.” After he was exiled by Ceaușescu in 1968, he eventually became spiritual father to a Romanian women's monastery in Michigan, where a steady stream of pilgrims flowed to make their confessions and receive his counsel until his death in 2015.

Before the Revolution, Father Roman was certified to teach Romanian language and literature, and he often emphasized the importance of literature for transmitting what is good, true, and beautiful in any culture, a conviction that predated his academic training. Recalling a life-changing encounter with Father Nicodemus Sachelarie, his confessor at the Condriţa monastery and now a saint in the Romanian church, Father Roman recounted:

That a monk in rural Romania recommends Dostoevsky in confession, and that this literary encounter is a life-changing event for one who will suffer for the faith and teach thousands, bespeaks the connectedness of literature to life in Orthodoxy, and what we might call the living literariness of Orthodox spirituality.

Eastern Orthodoxy comprises the second largest Christian group worldwide and is one of the fastest growing religious groups in North America but remains largely terra incognita for Western people, a third term outside the Catholic-Protestant binaries that shape Western religion.