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Imagining Narnia

CS. Lewis is hard to like and easy to love. As a solitary, clever, and bookish child he was a study in precocity, a model prig. “I have a prejudice against the French,” he announced, a four year old, to his father. Why? “If I knew why it wouldn’t be a prejudice.” At the age of nine he was . . . . Continue Reading »

Auden and the Limits of Poetry

By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »

Lewis Remembered

C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections.By John Lawlor.Spence. 132 pp. $22.95. When John Lawlor became a student at Magdalen College of Oxford University in October of 1936, he found that C. S. Lewis was to be his tutor. At that time, of course, he knew nothing in particular of Lewis, but over the . . . . Continue Reading »

C. S. Lewis on Mere Science

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Everyday C.S. Lewis

“One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian. One might so easily confuse it with being a good Christian.” Thus C. S. Lewis wrote in Reflections on the Psalms. Similarly, Lewis’s religious writings are full of asides to the effect that he is not a theologian and that what he . . . . Continue Reading »

Infernal Counsel

Dear Cachexia, Well, isn’t this impressive! You’ve had charge of this patient of yours for just two weeks and you’ve already managed to let him slip into taking part in a pro-life demonstration at a Planned Parenthood “clinic.” How do you do it? Keep this up, and you’ll soon discover . . . . Continue Reading »

Mortality: The Measure of Our Days

For much of human history death was associated at least as much with infancy and youth as with old age. To live to be old was an achievement—a modest victory over death, and one often thought of in religious terms as a blessing. In our time, however, when death and old age so often go hand in . . . . Continue Reading »

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