C. S. Lewis

As this campaign season reels recklessly, leaving a wake of increasing intolerance, those holding differing opinions can find little common ground. Past seasons of “come, let us reason together” have disappeared; unreasoned assertions from the chronically ignorant now dominate the increasingly purchased airwaves. Little from any side appears balanced or fair. We craft dollar-driven hegemonies of self-satisfied ignorance, cultures of the titillated and thoughtless. Where we once enshrined the ideals of freedom, we now erect a golden calf of contempt atop a tower of babble. Call it the gospel according to the uninformed.

When creed gives way to screed, who speaks into our opinionated age with a staid voice of wisdom?

Stewart Goetz’s book is provocative and carefully argued. But I am puzzled as to why the ordinary reader of C. S. Lewis would be worried about the road not taken.

The proliferation of Inklings books is often prompted by Christian triumphalism. Carol and Philip Zaleski have something more interesting to say.

I've never knowingly visited purgatory or fairy land, but I have set foot in a few small places that, once entered, prove to be larger.

“There needs to be a reason before the reasons began why you’d engage with an argument about God at all. This, I think, is where it makes sense to speak in the language of experience, of emotion.”

Of the four kinds of love, affection is most linked to place. It arises among those who share a common life not by choice but by circumstance.

When I am not involved in matters religious or scholarly, one of my favorite escapes is science fiction and fantasy literature or media. My favorite series is The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. 

The series focuses on the actions of four friends, pushed by circumstances from their little village into the larger world. They discover along the way that they are meant to play central roles in the coming Last Battle of the Ages.

This fall, C. S. Lewis's memorial stone will be unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Poets' Corner couldn't ask for a better tour guide.

Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth is opposed to death, and he thinks he has a solution.