A very enjoyable and worthwhile book (and by a likely Christian). It’s a biography of the first part of Lewis’s life — that is, through his conversion — that weaves in his contemporaneous and later writings to show his intellectual/faith journey.
Sayers was a British contemporary of C.S. Lewis’s, and a Christian fellow traveler who is well thought of by many conservatives and Christians. This book is all right, but I have to say that based on it I’m not so impressed that I’m inclined to read her systematically. She is sometimes obscure, and sometimes overreaches. … [Read more…]
This was an interesting book, stressing in particular the fact that Lewis was always a rhetorician, in the classical sense — that is, always trying to persuade people by what he wrote. There’s some academic denseness in it; here are a few notes I made: When Lewis was living with Mrs. Moore, it “almost certainly … [Read more…]
At 940 pages, this book can be called comprehensive; it includes a 120-page bibliography, summaries of works, and lists of key ideas, who’s who, and what’s what.
This book is a series of vignettes by people who knew C.S. Lewis personally. What a wonderful man: generous, talkative, unpretentious, positive — a real role model. And there is material of interest beyond his personality in here: Jacques Barzun was a fan, Lewis accepts original sin because Paul seemed to (159), Lewis did not … [Read more…]
My interpretation is that he doesn’t say Christianity was the cause of Rome’s fall, but he certainly says it was a contributing factor. He also says that the number of martyrs was exaggerated (but he’s looking at just the reign of Diocletian). The book was probably considered more radical for his day than we’d consider … [Read more…]
A couple of notes: (1) There was no consensus among Romans about an afterlife. (2) “Most early Roman gods were not anthropomorphic in nature until they became identified with Greek gods, so there is unlikely to have been much scope to invent myths about Roman gods. There is very little surviving evidence for Roman and … [Read more…]
I read that more relevant chapters, discussing the similarities among ancient faiths but also their differences; for example, non-Jews there saw man’s creation by the gods as motivated by a desire to save the latter from work via the food sacrifices offered to them by the former. These people, it should be borne in mind, … [Read more…]
“According to Mesopotamian religion, human beings were created to serve the gods. Each city had a patron god, and these gods lived in images in the temples dedicated to them. The priests and other people who worked at the temples were their servants. Kings were thought to be appointed by the will of … [Read more…]
(All three of these are labeled by the library as juvenile literature.) Some notes: Assyria also relocated troublesome people it had conquered (51). The Sumerians had clocks that used 60-second minutes and 60-minute hours. Babylon was very much an on-again, off-again empire during the time it was (sporadically) ascendant, from 1792-539 B.C. Note: Babylon is … [Read more…]