Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire yet eventually prove incapable...
For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys fundamental things—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed f...
For Lewis, people are too easily taken in by the latest cultural and intellectual fashions. Wanting to be up to date in their thinking, they uncritically accept the latest ideas they read about in the...
Erasmus produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516, based on the original Greek texts.
No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the Text.
Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.
John Polkinghorne (born 1930) comments on this point as follows: We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes scienc...
I turned away from one belief system that tried to deny it was anything of the sort, and accepted another which was quite open and honest about its status. My conversion was an act of free-thinking. I...
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.[14]
Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all...
We are, Lewis suggested, like a seed waiting in the good earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life,...
We are doomed to remain incomplete in our present existence. Our hopes and deepest longings will remain nothing but just that; Our hopes and longings. This bittersweet tension remains real, even for t...
The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.415
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizatio...
One of the great themes of the Christian Bible is that, whenever God asks us to do something for him, he gives us the gifts we need to do it. Knowing us for what we are, he equips us for what he wants...
More serious was the misprint in an edition of 1631, which rendered Exodus 20:14 as follows: Thou shalt commit adultery. The omission of the word not was speedily corrected, but not before this had ca...
Manz, formerly one of Zwingli's closest allies, held that there was no biblical warrant for infant baptism. Refusing to recant his views, he was tied up and drowned in the River Limmat.
Lewis’s appeal is to our imaginations.
Lewis rightly points out that this desire to be part of the Inner Ring is not really about friendship at all. It is about our own insecurity and yearning to matter. It is about using friends as tools...