Month: April 2020

Liberty or License?

  

Some people are beginning to grumble about the stay-at-home orders during this COVID-19 era. Protests are beginning to pop up in various state capitals. The concern, they say, is that their liberty is being trampled by authoritarian government. At this juncture, it might be beneficial to define terms. Noah Webster, America’s first lexicographer, offered in his 1828 dictionary a key distinction between the words “liberty” and “license.” He divided liberty into various types, one of which was “civil liberty,” the… Read more »

Politics & Sick Societies

  

I was perusing C. S. Lewis’s essays in the volume The Weight of Glory this past week and came across something I had read before and had highlighted in that earlier reading (that’s what professors do when they read–they highlight things so they’re easier to find again). It was in the essay titled “Membership.” The entire essay deals with the individual vs. the collective and the proper understanding of the Body of Christ and how that’s not the same as… Read more »

To My Fellow Christian Believers during COVID-19

  

How should Christians act, react, and think, while going through the current COVID-19 “social distancing” restrictions? There are some divisions being revealed and “sides” being taken among some, not all, of my fellow believers. For what it’s worth, I’d like to offer my thoughts on this. I hope you will give them a hearing, if not complete acceptance. Unity is always difficult in the best of times, let alone when our feelings may be intensified during a stretch when we… Read more »

Good Friday/Easter: The Mere Christian Message

  

On this Good Friday/Easter weekend, the Christian message of sacrificial death and resurrection may be brought more to the forefront of minds that normally think little of such things. The message is the same at all times, but this weekend sharpens the focus. To the natural mind, death is finality. There is no comprehension of how it can be of any good. Yet C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, shows us how: On the one hand Death is the… Read more »

Tomorrow Is the Day

  

Tomorrow we celebrate—and that most certainly is the best word to use—the Resurrection. Nothing like it appeared in history before that tremendous event and nothing like it followed afterward. It is the central event in all of history, never to be topped by anything else. The Nativity, which we call Christmas, was essential only because it was to lead to this event. The Second Coming of Christ and the Judgment to follow would be the most awful occurrence for everyone… Read more »

“Modern Men” & How They Think

  

C. S. Lewis wrote the essay “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought” in 1946. Now, some people, noting the date of that essay, will dismiss it immediately. After all, they might ask, “How can an essay from 1946 that talks about modern man have anything worthwhile to say to us in 2020?” That question, of course, rests on one’s definition of modern. As a historian, I have no problem seeing 1946 as modern because I compare that date with… Read more »