Reflections on God … Man … Life
I’ve now completed my research into the letters of C. S. Lewis to Americans. It was a joy to delve into them. Near the end of his life, Lewis wrote often of his expectation of heaven. He was in bad health for the last couple of years, and held rather loosely to this world. As he explained to Mary Van Deusen, one of his most regular correspondents, who was contemplating a move from one house to another, I think I… Read more »
Well, at least he’s sincere. How many times have you heard that? It’s a cliché that’s supposed to cover all sins. The problem is that we equate sincerity with truth, or at least we say we “respect” someone who is trying to follow what he/she believes. There is one thing we need to keep in mind, though: A sincere belief can be sincerely wrong. That’s Snyderian Truism #13 in my ever-expanding list of what I think ought to be undeniable… Read more »
One of the more remarkable men in the history of colonial America has to be William Penn. He was imprisoned in England for his divergent religious views: he was a Quaker. Yet he was granted a huge tract of land in the New World that eventually became the state of Pennsylvania. How does someone go from a member of a persecuted group to a crown-ordained proprietor? It had to do with his father, Admiral William Penn, who was instrumental in… Read more »
Going through the letters of C. S. Lewis, I reached, this week, the time in 1960 when his wife, Joy, died. After a two-year cancer hiatus, the disease came back in full force throughout her bones. Lewis always knew this could happen. In 1957, after the laying on of hands and prayer, she made a miraculous recovery (even the doctors admitted as much). Yet both she and Lewis knew this might not be a permanent thing, that perhaps God was… Read more »
On this date, in 1973, the United States Supreme Court effectively ruled that abortion is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Since then, approximately 57 million innocent lives have been taken. Many Americans have learned to “live with” these results, apparently numbed morally by the outright horror of an act that has cost more lives than anything done by Hitler or Stalin. We have been trained to think the human child is not a child. We have been schooled by… Read more »
C. S. Lewis’s letters to his American correspondents cover the gamut of topics. Sometimes, he goes into deeply Biblical issues, offering advice from his well of knowledge. Other times, he is more whimsical, but also with an air of wisdom that is hard to miss. To one of his regular correspondents going through some physical trials, he ruminates on the process of getting older. Maybe I’m drawn to this because of my own advancing years, but, for whatever reason, I… Read more »
Perhaps the only thing some people know about Puritan history in America is that they executed presumed witches. Americans typically know nothing about how Puritans gave us our first constitution and bill of rights, but they are always told about the Salem witchcraft trials. How does one analyze this episode of Puritan history fairly? Of course, most historians automatically denigrate the Puritans for it because they operate on a naturalistic worldview that says belief in witches is a superstition of… Read more »