Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis’s rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily abo...
Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. My own eyes are not enough for m...
Later Protestant writers would refer to this as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae—the article by which the church stands or falls.
It was not long before the possibly serious translation errors uncovered in the Vulgate threatened to force revision of existing church teachings. Erasmus pointed out some of these in 1516. An excelle...
Apologetics is both a science and an art. It is not just about knowledge; it is about wisdom. It’s like a skilled and experienced medical practitioner, who knows the theory of medicine well. But she h...
Apologetics aims to convert believers into thinkers, and thinkers into believers.
A further difference between the 1611 printing of the work and the 1613 reprint is of interest. Their variant translations of Ruth 3:15 led to the earlier printing being known as the Great He Bible (1...
The marginal notes to the Geneva Bible did more than provide theological elucidation at points of difficulty—the most profitable annotations upon the hard places mentioned on the title page of the wor...
We must not think that religious concerns swamped all other social activities. They simply provided a focal point for them.
To speak of the rise of Protestantism is to offer a controlling narrative that links these potentially disparate events as part of a greater, more significant movement. So persuasive was this emerging...
The explicit royal stipulation that all forms of annotation would be excluded ensured that the difficulties created for the establishment by the Geneva Bible would be avoided—or so, at any rate, it wa...
Lewis had discovered the calming and coping impact, not merely of reading literature, but of putting his feelings into his own words. It was as if the mental process of forging sentences tempered and...
It’s the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word p...
Further concerns were expressed over the king's increasingly obvious homosexual tendencies, which led to certain royal favorites being granted favors that were the subject of much comment and envy. Ro...
For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the big picture and discern the grand story of all things, so that the snapsho...
There is no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching. What really matters is friendship, pure and simple.
The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms...
The English of 1611 is not the English of the twenty-first century. It can mislead us, simply because English words have changed their meaning. For example, consider the sentence: For this we say unto...
Take Lewis’s argument from desire. He basically argues that we experience desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. And when we see these experiences through the lens of the Chri...
An exception to this was the English community in Geneva, which attracted approximately one-quarter of the émigrés; it was hailed by John Knox as the most perfect school of Christ, the finest embodime...