“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” Editor’s Note: In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis [...]
Religion shaped the Inklings as much or even more than did whatever generational zeitgeist one might want to attribute to the group… Though not the best-known Inkling, Adam Fox had the privilege of being the first of the group to arrive in this world. Through no choice of his own, he appeared on July 13, [...]
Taken together, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton might not be a holy trinity but they are certainly a holy triumvirate enabling us to see the world with rooted clarity and childlike wisdom. One of the most interesting and spontaneously thought-provoking questions that I’ve ever been asked in an interview was asked by an [...]
C.S. Lewis’ assent and ascent to Christianity would be laborious and always deeply intellectual, guided and influenced by Catholicism even as the Romanists repulsed him. “Outside a life of literary study, life has no meaning or attraction for him,” W. T. Kirkpatrick, C.S. Lewis’s tutor, informed his father. “He is adapted for nothing else. You [...]
G.K. Chesterton had a profound impact on the visions of both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, so much so that he could be said to have baptized their imaginations… Editor’s Note: Joseph Pearce recently granted the following interview to The Whetstone, a student newspaper of Montreal College, North Carolina. What do you see as your role, your calling, and [...]
What right do I have to be walking in His Love and not reaping the miserable harvest of the hateful seeds I had sown? I have no right. It’s not about rights, but about Love and the mercy which is its fruit… In C.S. Lewis’s magical tale, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the [...]
The Roman teachers were acutely aware of the role of audience. In its classical sense, rhetoric means the use of language, whether in speech or tex, to persuade an audience… The word rhetoric is thrown about in mostly negative ways—accuse someone of employing rhetoric and you have implied a lack of sincerity or content (which [...]
In 1962, a little-known professor of English published an important book that demonstrated how the experience of the twentieth century gave the lie to the misplaced optimism of the nineteenth century… From Utopia to Nightmare by Chad Walsh (Harper Collins, 1962) Almost no one remembers Chad Walsh anymore. Our loss. A professor of English at Beloit [...]
In defining the Great Divide as that between Old Western Man and New Western Man, C.S. Lewis has given us a radically new way of looking at the past. I write not as an expert to tell you of my thought but to explain a particular concept of Lewis’s and my own application of it [...]
“Capitalism” needs to be pinned down by definition; it needs to be circumscribed so that it doesn’t lead us off in increasingly meaningless and therefore futile lines of reasoning… If words are to have any value they must have definite and definable meanings. If too many meanings are ascribed to a single word, the word [...]
C.S. Lewis would not allow disagreement to become personal. He could always distinguish the man from the man’s opinion, and he knew the difference between an argument and a quarrel. Truth was ultimately at stake, and truth mattered to him… As a fellow of one of the colleges at the University of Oxford, I have [...]
Friendship, or philia, is one of the “loves” that C.S. Lewis elucidates and celebrates in his book, The Four Loves, the others being familial love (storge), sexual love (eros) and Divine love (caritas or agape). Although not the greatest or highest of the loves, Lewis saw friendship as the noble coming together of those who [...]
This year marks the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest conflagrations in human history in which more than a million men were killed or wounded. One of the lucky survivors was J.R.R. Tolkien, who described the battle as being an “animal horror.” Bearing the psychological scars of this horror for [...]
For some years now, there has been a genial quarrel between those who use e-readers like Nook and Kindle and those who prefer real books with actual pages. John Senior, if he were alive today, would undoubtedly denounce my Kindle. Dr. Senior was the most prominent of the founders of the Integrated Humanities Program at [...]