Reflections on God … Man … Life
Yesterday was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. He would have been 102. Many of us long to have a president like him again. To commemorate his presidency and to remind you of his insights, I hereby present an excerpt from one of his most famous speeches. In 1983, he spoke to the National Association of Evangelicals, where he blatantly called the Soviet Union an evil empire. He was correct. Yet, beyond that, I hope you can see the heart of the man… Read more »
Some people are good at speaking truth directly. Others have a more thoughtful way of communicating truth. I think that’s one reason why I’m enamored of C. S. Lewis’s manner of writing. He will lead you to truth, but do so while helping you see it in a different light. Take this comment, for instance: The Christian religion . . . does not begin in comfort; it begins in . . . dismay. . . . In religion, as in… Read more »
The view that the people, as a collective, are always right is fallacious. The voters make huge mistakes all the time. Yet so do kings and totalitarian rulers. What, then, is the solution? Our Founders came up with an arrangement that sought to minimize the sinfulness and foolishness of man. The federal republic they created, while not perfect, since there is no perfect system in this world, nevertheless has the potential to diminish the bad effects of man’s selfish tendencies…. Read more »
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis tells of his childhood fascination with books, a fascination that never went away through a lifetime of reading and writing. See if you can relate to what he says here; I know I can. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My… Read more »
Lewis, in the preface to his Screwtape Letters, provides a very interesting insight into where we are most likely to find evil in our day. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even in concentration camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in… Read more »
When C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy died, he went through a crisis of faith. He wrote a book at the time into which he poured out his questions to God. It was called A Grief Observed. This quote is taken from that book, and is part of what he had to learn through this experience. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is… Read more »
C. S. Lewis had to make the journey from atheism to Christianity. In his book Mere Christianity, he explains how he came up against the lack of logic in his atheistic position: [When I was an atheist] my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was… Read more »