During World War II, C.S. Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West, the great principle of which is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Joseph Sobran as he [...]
In modern America, all the dystopian horrors exist hand-in-hand with what seems like one perpetual theme-park existence. The war, torture, abortions, castrations, murders, suicides, drug addiction, homelessness, and medical horrors reside side-by-side with the smiling face of America, where everyone has perfect teeth and waves out a cheerful, “Have a nice day!”… Having just re-read [...]
C.S. Lewis is recognized as a Christian lay apologist, a writer of children’s books, an adept novelist and fantasist, and a literary scholar and logician, still eliciting strong reactions, favorable or unfavorable, from his readers. On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black [...]
Compared to today’s decidedly pragmatic US President, the tradition-minded Cambridge medievalist proves to be more exclusive and more provincial, for it is the creator of the beloved Narnia series who would resist tenaciously any attempt to flood his country with Norwegians, however law-abiding and productive. So before preaching the Benedict Option or crusading for pro-life feminism, let the [...]
While most of us associate C.S. Lewis with theological literature, the renowned author sounded the siren against progressivism’s clear dangers not only to the political rights and liberties of man, but also to our very perception of the reality of mankind. C.S. Lewis: World-renowned author, philosopher, theologian. Christian apologist. Mere mention of his name fills [...]
The real test of normality is whether we consider the collective experience of human history to be more authentically normal than the current norms imposed by contemporary fads and fashions and the ascendant ideologies of which the fads and fashions are but the social expression… It is intriguing that being normal is normally seen as [...]
Since the present meaning of a word is often vaguely swayed by past meanings which have dropped into the subconscious, a knowledge of particular semantic histories can increase our facility and sometimes save us from an inadvertent error. Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis (352 pages, Cambridge University Press, 1960) Anyone reading the literature of modern semantics [...]
Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words, how can a good God permit bad things [...]
The value of fairy stories lies in the fact that they serve as a lens by which the heavenly can be seen on the earth, a lens by which the deepest and most important realities are grasped. They allow us to judge evil from the perspective of the good, and the imperfect from the perspective [...]
Each of the nineteen essays in Present Concerns is packed with wisdom that can profitably be taken in little chunks over time and meditated upon over a steaming hot cup of tea or an even bigger pint of ale, perhaps even with a pipe pinched between one’s teeth, as Lewis surely would have it. Present [...]
A renowned medievalist who did her post-doctoral work at Oxford under such luminaries as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Sister Madeleva Wolff wrote poetry as beautifully as she handled expertly all the chores of a Wisconsin farmer. “Accidents are so often God’s way of being doubly good to us” She is one of the most [...]
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien fought to defend Faith and Family from attacks upon them by modern-day dragons, but they would not wield the power of the Deplorable Word, nor the power of the Ring, to destroy their enemies, simultaneously destroying the lives of innocent victims in the process. In “Litany of the Lost,” a [...]
The Shakespeare scholar who crossed swords with C.S. Lewis describes Lewis in the early 1950s, at the height of his fame, as “a red-faced, egg-headed, portly, jolly, middle-aged man, who was (like Old King Cole) fond of his pipe and his glass of beer.” Father Peter Milward Father Peter Milward SJ, who died [...]
It is hard, as a modern, to know the right questions to ask, to know when all questions fall silent in the presence of absolute Truth, of Revelation. In his final book, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis writes about the Mediaeval world view: “All the apparent contradictions must be harmonised. A Model must be built which [...]