New Columbia Review

S uppose you are a Christian —in the absolute loosest sense of the word— and you come upon a man who professes that he does not believe in God.  You may be dismayed and you may try and think of something clever to gently nudge him in the proper direction of being a theist.  You quickly revert back to a simple wager in that if one dies believing in God, they will be saved; but if one dies not believing in God, they will be damned.  You then make the case that it is better to risk dying and being wrong about God's existence, than it is to risk eternal damnation.  You have used a simplified and convincing argument known as 'The Bet', or, Pascal's Wager. You, being clever, think that you have the atheist stuck in a simple dilemma where the only pragmatic and reasonable choice is to believe in God.  For to believe in God, is to potentially gain the rewards of eternal happiness and life; whereas the risk in the alternative is damnation.  However, you have made a mistake i

O ver the course of fine literature none cuts opinions down so fine a line and construes interpretations such as Vladimir Nabokov's famous work Lolita .  This is one of those novels that many have an opinion whether or not they have actually taken the time to devour this literary masterpiece.  Simply put, Lolita is one of the most disturbingly beautiful novels America has to offer in the realms of contemporary literature.  Beautiful not necessarily in what it tries to say —for the topic is revolting— but in how it goes about saying it.  Reading such eloquent, but easily readable English, one would be shocked to find that English is a second language for this Russian-American author; yet for Mr. Nabokov, he found it sadly to be 'second-rate' to his much preferred and beloved "governess of Saint Petersburg."   Lolita was not his first English novel, but it most certainly was the novel that vaulted him into literary status among the Anglo-sphere. With it, there