The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

C.S. Lewis: Authentic Apologetics

The following talk was given by Eighth Day Books owner and founder Warren Farha who speaks meaningfully to the import of C.S. Lewis and his work.

“How can we characterize the apologetics of C.S. Lewis? Books have been written on this topic, but I have not read them; I mostly just read Lewis himself. So let me give you a few impressions as to why Lewis was and is such an extraordinarily effective apologist for our times.

I have always been struck by Lewis’s honesty, which is another way of saying his humility. It is an honesty that is clearly not an affectation or a false modesty. It appears to us from his frequent use of his own experience to establish an identification with his listener and reader. It is an honesty that is compellingly winsome and disarming. I could (but won’t) give a dozen examples. Here are a few.

In his Introduction to a later edition of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis makes this disclaimer: “Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. ‘My heart’—I need no other’s— ‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’” In recounting his movement from atheism to faith, his renewed awareness of serious and culpable moral defect, Lewis describes his inner man: “Really, a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to ‘know of the doctrine.’ All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion” [Surprised by Joy, p. 226].

There is always the sense in Lewis that you are listening to someone who has faced doubt and despair in their most intense form and is willing to relate the truth of the gospel in light of that experience. In a passage of unforgettable power, here Lewis speaks obliquely through the senior tempter Screwtape to his understudy Wormwood: “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys” [see Screwtape Letters, Chapter 8].

It is this same stark honesty that provides one of the fundamental principles Lewis explicitly sets forth in his essay on—you guessed it—Christian apologetics. He insists repeatedly that those who proclaim the message of the gospel must do so—not because it is “healthy” or “good for society” or conducive to an individual’s peace of mind—but because it is true.

A second aspect of Lewis’s apologetics—one closely related to his honesty—is his ability to communicate with “everyman” —the common person. Here I must become somewhat autobiographical. I first picked up a book by C.S. Lewis when I was a junior in high school—it was Mere Christianity. I am not a scholar by temperament. I am a worker. My lineage descends through merchants on my father’s side, farmers on my mother’s. I was raised lower to middle middle class. Yet, I opened this little paperback book and was immediately entranced, drawn, provoked, convicted, convinced, and changed forever by it. Reading Lewis inevitably educates, lifts the intellect, opens windows not only onto a more mature understanding of bedrock Christian doctrine, but also to a wide range of other concerns—mythological, literary, philosophical. And perhaps the greatest aspect of this exposure to his incredible variety of interests is that the boundaries between them are fluid, if they exist at all (like reality itself). I have spoken with countless others who have had the same experience. Lewis says in his essay on Christian apologetics, “I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.” Lewis has shown in countless instances his ability to do just that. He has abundantly fulfilled his own definition of what authentic apologetics is all about.

But the most powerful source of Lewis’s success as a Christian apologist is the fact that his apologetics springs from Joy. Lewis understood that Joy lies at the heart of the experience of every man and woman born on the earth, and that it is every man’s and every woman’s most intimate link to God. Joy is immediate, yet infrequent in our experience. It is winsome, yet beautiful to the extent of pain. It is a longing for something that events and phenomena in this world evoke, yet it points to a source other than this world. Lewis’s own words, as usual, are the best way to convey it: “In speaking of this far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name…” [see “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses].

There is no more common link between us than the experience of Joy, and it is this experience that Lewis relies upon more than any other to point to our need to reconnect to God and to His Christ. The experiences that evoke Joy are infinitely varied, but what is common is that they come unbidden, unexpected, and we cannot artificially manufacture them or cause them to be repeated, no matter how we might try. The ultimate apologetic force of this “inconsolable longing” is stated in most concentrated form in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” [Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 10]. In more expanded form, we find the same message in The Problem of Pain: “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else…It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work…All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever…The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his life will save it.”

 

Halloween: Separating Fact From Fiction

There is a lot of poor research on the net concerning the meaning and origins of Halloween. When I was an Anglican priest I researched this topic and came to many of the same conclusions that John Sanidopoulos of the Orthodox blog Mystagogy has come to.  I think you will find his post “Orthodoxy and Halloween” to be very informative and probably very different than anything you have read on the subject before.The following quotations from John’s post hopefully will wet your appetite to read his informative post.

“This smear campaign against Halloween, in which it has been scapegoated among Christians as the ultimate manifestation of secularism and satanism in contemporary culture, only goes back to farely recent modern times when certain Christian groups resorted to any fanciful tale to counter the emerging counter-culture of the 60′s and 70′s that was corrupting the youth. Christian leaders since then have clutched us in a guilt trip ever since about a holiday which prior to this extreme reaction was indeed harmless for the most part like any other holiday and had no connection with satanic rituals. It was a cultural festival which, though mischievous at times, really posed no threat to society until we were forced to believe that it did.

The fact is that I also once opposed Halloween for religious reasons, being convinced by fundamentalist literature that it was the “devil’s holiday”, a conspiracy of Neopagans and Satanists to corrupt our youth. Later when I researched the background of the holiday I came to different conclusions. I realized in the impurity and evil of my egotistical heart I was choosing a much easier enemy to fight rather than the much more difficult enemy within, the enemy of my ego which easily saw scandal elsewhere rather than in the impurity and scandal within my own heart and mind.…..

“There’s zero evidence that the ancient Druids or their congregants ever dressed in identity-hiding costumes or engaged in ritualized begging at harvest time. The connections between these Druid practices and modern Halloween are based on early Roman sources and modern fundamentalist propaganda.”

Living Books and Text Books

What is the difference between a living book and a textbook?

-A living book is written by a single author, a real and knowable person.

-A textbook is written by various authors and contributors, usually unknown.

-A living book is a literary expression of the author’s own ideas and love of the subject.

-A textbook is  a non-literary expression of collected facts and information.

-A living book is personal in tone and feel. it touches the heart and the emotions and the intellect.

-A textbook is impersonal in tone and feel. It touches only the intellect.

-The author of a living book addresses the reader as an intelligent and capable thinker.

-In a living book, ideas are presented creatively in a way that stimulates the imagination.

-In a textbook, facts are presented without creativity in a way that deadens the imagination.

From Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay and Sally Clarkson.

Fr. Noah Bushelli – The Orthodox College and Orthodox Home Schooling

Fr. Noah Bushelli – The Orthodox College and Orthodox Home Schooling

Fr. Noah gave this short presentation concerning why an Orthodox Christian may home school which I thought is worth the readers time. He also makes some suggestions concerning how a future Orthodox College may include home schoolers. The lecture was presented at the recent Orthodoxy and Higher Education Conference that was held at St. Vladimer’s Seminary this past June.

Orthodoxy and Higher Education

“A pan-Orthodox steering committee of scholars and academics sponsored this conference in June of 2011 on the St. Vladimir’s Seminary campus, to explore the possibility of the establishment of a new Orthodox College in North America. Recognizing the increasing desire, and longstanding need, for greater collegiality, familiarity, and scholarly collaboration among Orthodox academics, the committee invites all who are interested in thinking about Orthodoxy and higher education to listen this conference.” Listen to the 29 lectures on Ancient Faith Radio .

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way.
In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah’s Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs’s interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you–the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices.
Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.”- Amazon.com

Was Easter Borrowed from a Pagan Holiday?

“Anyone encountering anti-Christian polemics will quickly come up against the accusation that a major festival practiced by Christians across the globe—namely, Easter—was actually borrowed or rather usurped from a pagan celebration. I often encounter this idea among Muslims who claim that later Christians compromised with paganism to dilute the original faith of Jesus.

The argument largely rests on the supposed pagan associations of the English and German names for the celebration (Easter in English and Ostern in German). It is important to note, however, that in most other European languages, the name for the Christian celebration is derived from the Greek word Pascha, which comes from pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. Easter is the Christian Passover festival.” – Read the entire article at Christianhistory.net

HT: Frontier Orthodoxy Blog

Mt. Athos will be featured on the CBS show “60 minutes” on Pascha Evening

NEW YORK – The Holy Mountain Athos, the over a thousand year sanctuary of Orthodox Christian monasticism, and which is directly under the spiritual jurisdiction of His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, will be featured on the CBS News program “60 Minutes”, scheduled to air on Pascha Sunday.  The segment, “The Monks of Mount Athos”, will recount 60 Minutes Correspondent Bob Simon’s journey to a remote peninsula in North Greece that millions of Orthodox Christians consider the most sacred place on earth, Mouth Athos.
On the recommendation and with the blessing of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who opened the doors for the “60 Minutes” team, and after two trips to the mountain and two years of dialogue with the Anthonite community, last Fall Simon and the “60 Minutes” team were given unprecedented access to document monastic life on the Holy Mountain.  The result is a portrait of a place rarely seen where prayer has been offered by holy men everyday, with no interruption, for more than a thousand years.

The “Monks of Mount Athos” will be broadcast Sunday, April 24, 2011 on the CBS Television Network at 7:00 PM EST.  Harry Radliffe and Michael Karzis are the producers of  the segment.

“60 Minutes” is the pre-eminent investigative television news show in the United States and has run on CBS since 1968. It has been among the top-rated TV programs for much of its life and has garnered numerous awards over the years.  The show will also be broadcast over the Internet on the “60 Minutes” website: www.60minutes.com

More information about the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as well as texts of his addresses of His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew may be found at: www.patriarchate.org. -From goarch.org

HT: Fr. Alexander

Thinking about Homeschooling?

There is a lot of information available on the web concerning homeschooling. If a parent is thinking about homeschooling it is very easy to become discouraged because of not knowing where to begin.  For the sake of simplicity allow me to recommend  a book and two links on the subject that will give you a simple and inexpensive way to homeschool. A person new to homeschooling must be open to realizing that the education structure of public education is not the only way to educate children. The primary reason (not the only reason)  that my wife and I homeschool our children is because education should educate the soul of a child and not just their brain. The secular world does not believe souls exist so why would they try to educate one. I recommend a Charlotte Mason approach to homeschool education.

1. Read Real Learning:Education in the Heart of the Home by Elizabeth Foss. You can get a taste of Elizabeth Foss’ work on her website In the Heart of My Home.

2. Visit Ambleside Online for all of your homeschooling plans and books. Ambleside  Online is a “free homeschool curriculum designed to be as close as possible to the curriculum that Charlotte Mason used in her own private and correspondence schools. Our goal is to be true to Charlotte Mason’s high literary standards. Ambleside Online uses the highest quality books and costs no more than the cost of texts. The curriculum uses as many free online books as possible, and there is no cost to use this information or join the support group”.

3. Visit The Tanglewood School for additional curriculum ideas and reasonably priced, high quality materials.

I think these three links are all you need to develop a simple, well planned, well rounded education for your children. Do not get too bogged down in too much homeschooling information.