For those who Chowed Down for years on the Watchtower's "spiritual food" (who was that talking about Schit on a Schingle in an earlier post?) and thought you were getting Christianity, and have now left the Table of jehovah-Of-The-Watchtower...
and purged what you consumed...
and still haven't given up on Christianity - (hey, Jesus did warn of Counterfeits)
and maybe would like to approach it afresh, why not check out the writings of C.S.Lewis?
He's one of my favorites.
And as this recent article from The Boston Globe informed, Lewis's body of work is making a "comeback"... even though it never went away.
(what appears below, only more legible, here: * http://www.intrex.net/tallyman/cslewis.html)
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By MICHAEL PAULSON
THE BOSTON GLOBE
The stories of C.S. Lewis are familiar to millions of children:
a fantastical, hidden world ruled by an evil witch, loved by a great lion.
Less familiar to the 65 million purchasers of Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" is the fact that the stories are Christian allegories, penned by the Oxford don after J.R.R. Tolkien helped convert him to Christianity. [Lewis once subscribed to atheism]
To many, Lewis (1898-1963), was one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century. Now the publishing industry is betting a larger audience is waiting to discover his works.
After a multimillion-dollar deal between HarperCollins Publishers and the Lewis estate, the publishing house is re-issuing all of Lewis' major works ...
The texts had hardly vanished. "The Screwtape Letters," a 1942 work of satire in which a devil instructs an apprentice, already sells 150,000 copies a year, while "Mere Christianity," which was developed as a series of radio talks on faith, sells 230,000 copies annually. And Lewis's marriage to his wife, Joy, was chronicled in the 1993 movie "Shadowlands," starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
"Few resources are more often used than the writings of C.S. Lewis,"
said the [chaplain of Harvard College] who recommends the works to students ...
"If they come from some sort of church background but are wrestling with their own Christianity, then I point them to "Mere Christianity". If the questions point more in the direction of a moment of self-doubt or low self-esteem, I suggest "Til We Have Faces".
If they've sustained the loss of a parent or close friend, I suggest "A Grief Observed".
But HarperCo, to create a broader audience for an author dead for 40 years, is also trying to create buzz by reintroducing Lewis to authors and academics. "After the last 10 years, religion publishing has grown by leaps and bounds, and C.S. Lewis's books have sold several hundred thousand copies a year before we took over," said Mary Ellen Curley, marketing director for HarperCollins.
"We're looking to broaden him to anyone who is interested not only in Christianity, but in a broader sense of spirituality - the seekers out there."
Recently at Harvard, a poet a psychiatrist, and a philosopher took turns praising Lewis' work, comparing him to everyone from St. Augustine to Sigmund Freud.
Poet Kathleen Norris, author of "The Cloister Walk" said she was particularly struck by Lewis's language, his choice of words that reach out to readers as ff they were listeners.
"He is valuable to show the strength of the imagination," she said.
"He writes very personally, but there is not a trace of narcissism, and that is incredibly valuable."
The psychiatrist Armand Nicholi, and the philosopher, Boston College professor Peter Kreeft, both said that they rejected Lewis at first because they thought his work too simple, but later came to rely on him for the logical clarity of his faith.
"Lewis's appeal today continues ... [because] he has real insight into human nature and the human condition," Nicholi said. He added that Lewis had a profound understanding
of human experiences, such as grief. Lewis' wife was diagnosed with cancer the year the pair got married and died four years later.
And Kreeft argued that Lewis "is enormously relevant to young people today, because he doesn't strive to be relevant today. He isn't interested in fashions."
July 2001
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