This is a scene-by-scene/each-year-a-chapter biography by a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Macmillan editor. I wasn’t really ready for another Lewis biography, having just finished The Narnian (in February 2012, discussed elsewhere on this site), so I just read the introductory material and chapter 1 (“1925”) and then all that piqued my interest from the index entries.
This is an excellent, sympathetic biography by, I am sure, a Christian (Jacobs is an English professor and director of the Faith and Learning Program at Wheaton College in Illinois). Lewis notes that some disputes about doctrine are not resolvable and/or don’t matter for us (214-15), a point I make elsewhere on this site. The … [Read more…]
First of all, note that these are letters not to Joy Davidson, but to another American lady. She’s a Southerner, older and frequently ill, which prompts Lewis to say that, though he has been critical of Britain’s welfare state, he likes the fact that everyone there has free healthcare — though he recognizes it means … [Read more…]
As the title indicates, the book is divided between the author’s personal memories of Lewis (his teacher) and his own reflections on Lewis’s writing (more his fiction and academic writing than his apologetics). He is a Lewis fan, but the trouble with the “reflections” (the “memories” are fine) is that they assume a just-read familiarity … [Read more…]
I read the beginning and end of the latter, which is a distillation of the former. Just these notes: The author is a fan of Paul; he’s critical of Luke’s reliability and Timothy’s performance as a leader. I read the beginning and end because I think that these are the parts of Paul’s life … [Read more…]
My favorite points from it: Be thankful for our fellow Christians, that we are not physically alone in our faith. Those psalms that we feel we should not pray for ourselves, we can pray through Christ (for example, the imprecatory psalms, or those claiming innocence). Oetinger arranged psalms “according to the seven petitions of the … [Read more…]
I found this book to be uneven: Some parts seemed to me to be unpersuasive and/or insufficiently rigorous, but there were some good parts, too. The book doesn’t really critique other religions in great detail, but it does do so to a degree. Page 190 n.5 is a good statement of Islam’s narrow origins and … [Read more…]
The recording of the book was okay, but I felt no need to read the actual text. It’s a straightforward and sympathetic biography; St. Augustine was not antisex, etc. The book is not too doctrinally complicated; it does discuss the dispute with Pelagius.
This biography is short and straightforward but not dumbed down. The author is an emeritus professor of history at Notre Dame. I have to admit that, while I am a great fan of Pascal’s, after reading this biography of him I feel no need to read a more detailed one. Pascal was indeed a remarkable … [Read more…]
“St. Thomas did not reconcile Christ to Aristotle; he reconciled Aristotle to Christ.” (28) Chesterton sees Aquinas as a very practical thinker: commonsensical rather than abstract-to-the-extreme as more modern thinkers are. Chesterton is also critical of both Augustine and Luther to an extent. Nothing wrong with the flesh: That’s part of who we are.