A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

C.S. Lewis

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus. Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party: It is not reasonable to suppose Read more

  • Aliens without sin

    Recently I’ve been reading A Case of Conscience by James Blish. This is a science fiction novel written in the 50s about a Jesuit priest/biologist studying a race of reptillian anthropoids on a distant planet. They have a seemingly perfect ethical society without friction or conflict, but also utterly destitute of religion or any sense Read more

  • Lord, teach us to pray

    This weekend we were visiting my family in my ancestral homeland of Western Pennsylvania. As is our habit, we attended the early service at the ELCA congregation in my hometown. This is a gem of a church and we always receive a warm welcome when we worship there, even though we don’t have a particular Read more

  • Fowl play

    Speaking of chickens, this review of a new book about the treatment of chickens under the conditions of industrial farming utterly fails to engage with the moral issue at hand. The author, Mick Hume, seems to think that factory farming is a mark of progress and anyone who questions whether the end (cheap meat) justifies Read more

  • On almost being liturgically indifferent

    See here for a well-informed (my comment excepted) discussion on things liturgical in light of the rumored forthcoming liberalization of the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass in the RCC. Obviously Protestants don’t directly have a horse in this race, but as Derek points out what the RCC does tends to affect Protestant bodies. I Read more

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves. In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson Read more

  • Lewis on morality and the State

    Here’s an interesting one, to Mrs. Edward A. Allen, February 1, 1958: I quite agree with the Archbishop that no sin, simply as such, should be made a crime. Who the deuce are our rulers to enforce their opinions about sin on us? — a lot of professional politicians, often venal time-servers, whose opinion on Read more

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters: To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952: It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual Read more

  • C. S. Lewis on Barthians

    I was reading selections last night from a volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters and came across an interesting (and rather amusing) one to his brother on February 18, 1940. Apparently Lewis had recently encountered a group of zealous students of this newfangled theologian Karl Barth: Did you fondly believe – I did – that where Read more

  • Wright on Lewis and some quibbles

    Readers might be interested in this critical appreciation of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by none other than N.T. Wright (who’s own Simply Christian has been called a Mere Christianity for the twenty-first century). Wright has much praise for Lewis of course, as well as some criticism. Some of the criticism hits the target, some of Read more