THE SACRED IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

We were promised that science would make the sacred unnecessary. Then the weather refused to be predicted, the markets refused to behave, a virus refused to read the forecasts, and millions of perfectly modern people went back to lighting candles, consulting horoscopes, and telling the Universe exactly what they wanted for their birthday. The sacred did not disappear. It changed its address, and in some cases its price tag.
Boris Kriger has looked at this question from more angles than is strictly healthy. He built a successful business and walked away from it. He became an Orthodox priest, published a weekly newspaper, turned his own home into a refuge for anyone who knocked, and watched that refuge fall. Then he did something stranger still: he built a model of the universe from nuclear physics and gravity - and only afterwards noticed that the old faith he had served could be read straight out of it.
This book is the honest result. It asks why ritual follows uncertainty like a shadow, what the brain is doing when a nun prays inside a scanner, why "the Universe" has quietly replaced God in coffee-shop conversation, and how the sacred ends up on a shelf next to the scented soap. It tells, without self-pity and with a good deal of laughter, what happens when a man of logic tries to kneel. And it does what almost no cosmologist has dared: it sets the author's own universe - finite, closed, warm, without an edge or a singular beginning - before the judgment of the Orthodox tradition, and lets the verdict fall where it falls.
Funny, generous, and stubbornly truthful, The Sacred in the Twenty-First Century is a book for believers who think, for skeptics who wonder, and for anyone who has ever stood in a dark room holding a match and not quite known whom to thank for it.