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As Islamists continue to kill innocents, they provide more fuel for the oft-made atheist claim that religion is evil. Atheist Richard Dawkins condemned the recent attacks in France by tweeting, "No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn't." Dawkins is right that some religions and religious people have consistently perpetrated evil. Atheists often use this fact to support atheism. However, the existence of evil turns out to be a bigger problem for atheists to explain than for theists. The kind of evil Dawkins and the rest...

JRR Tolkien in 1967 (Photo: PA) Books blog: Dr Holly Ordway's Not God's Type recounts a fascinating and uplifting journeyI have been reading Dr Holly OrdwayÂ’s Not GodÂ’s Type: an Atheist Academic Lays Down her Arms (Ignatius Press, or Gracewing in the UK). It is always uplifting to read books like this, not in a triumphalist way but because it is a reminder that underneath all the glaring human weaknesses in the Church as an institution, which we all know so well, there are still people out there who are searching for answers to fundamental questions and then finding...

There are multiple films in the works that will explore the relationship between literary fantasy giants J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, one called Tolkien & Lewis from Attractive Films and another called Jack & Tollers from Third Dart Studios. Still another from Fox Searchlight will focus only on Tolkien and is titled, appropriately enough, Tolkien. While the films are in the early stages, one of them — Tolkien & Lewis — is set to announce an interesting castmember: Jill Freud, aka the real Lucy Pevensie from Lewis’ books about Narnia. ...

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods' appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. "What's the rumpus about?" he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity's unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, "Oh, that's easy. It's grace." After some discussion, the conferees had to agree....

I grew up in a fundamentalist environment. The church I was baptized in believed it was inappropriate for Christians to go to a movie theater. To this day, my grandparents maintain this standard as a bulwark against worldliness. The library at my Christian school had a variety of books for children, sanitized for Christian consumption. Encyclopedia Brown made the cut, but all the “goshes” and “gee whizzes” were marked out with a heavy black pen. No second-hand cursing allowed. Films without anything objectionable were allowed at school, but looking back, I see how this analysis was applied simplistically. I still...

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis ”One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian ‘isms’ of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals...

On November 22, 1963 — just 50 years ago today — three eminent men died: President John F. Kennedy and the writers Aldous Huxley (b. 1894) and C. S. Lewis (b. 1898). In 1982, the philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote a clever and valuable fictional “dialogue of the dead” among the three, imagining them meeting and conversing just after death in a purgatorial state — Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere beyond Death. The fortunes of the three figures’ reputations over the last half-century make for an interesting comparison. The young, handsome, glamorous Kennedy, brutally slain by a left-winger at...

Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but the day also marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of famed authors C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Test your knowledge of these three historical giants with this quiz.

Few can have failed to notice that this day marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Throughout the summer, Lewis has featured prominently in literary festivals across the length and breadth of England. His home church - Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, Oxford - arranged a modest celebration of the anniversary in September, and found themselves swamped by the public interest. ...

I have a funny sort of personal connection to C.S. Lewis, who died 50 years ago today. It’s through my mother: she was born in London and is just old enough to remember the Blitz, and like the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she was sent to the countryside to escape the bombing. Unlike them ...

He went quietly. It was very British. While the world’s attention turned to Dallas and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one Clive Staples Lewis breathed his last in Oxford just a week shy of his 65th birthday. Strangely enough, science-fictionist Aldous Huxley passed the same day. In one calendar square, three of the 20th century’s most influential figures were gone. It was Nov. 22, 1963. C.S. Lewis is known best for his series of seven short fiction books, the “Chronicles of Narnia,” which have sold more than 100 million copies in 40 languages. With three of the stories...

Our 21st century cultural landscape is littered with the casualties of the Sexual Revolution, even though if you’ve been listening exclusively to its propaganda arms, the media and academia, you’re probably thinking the whole experiment has gone swimmingly. The No-Man’s land of the resulting Gender Wars is littered with dozens of new sexually transmitted diseases, brains saturated with increasingly twisted pornography, broken marriages, and shattered futures—but as long as slimy sleaze-mongers like Dan Savage get to write columns on how to incur fleeting physical pleasure, we’re all "free." Praise Third Wave Feminism and pass the condoms, I’ve got herpes to...

Three famous men died on Nov. 22, 1963. The one getting the most attention, understandably, is John F. Kennedy. Less so the other two: Aldous Huxley, author of the futuristic novel "Brave New World," and Clive Staples Lewis. Of the three, it was Lewis who not only was the most influential of his time, but whose reach extends to these times and likely beyond. His many books continue to sell and the number of people whose lives have been changed by his writing expands each year. On the 50th anniversary of his death, C.S. Lewis remains perhaps the 20th...

With apologies to C.S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters It's hard to fathom, even by our standards of non-compliance with the Other Side, what a marvelous catch this John Shelby Spong fellow has turned out to be. I doubt we could have created a more perfect model of apostasy and heresy all wrapped up in one man. For more than four decades, he has steadfastly aided and abetted our cause of disbelief. Atheists and skeptics are obvious sinners, but they are not a patch on a man who wears the cloth of his religion while defaming and declaiming...

Recently, while discussing the role of fictional stories in spiritual formation with my students, I found myself returning to the works of C.S. Lewis as an example. While I did not discuss The Chronicles of Narnia, I can undeniably say that the fictional works of Lewis have shaped me spiritually. From a young age, I have read and reread the Narnian stories. They have become a part of my spiritual formation and of many others as well. Lewis has had this effect on Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, as well. He also confesses to repeatedly reading and studying the...

A new book has been published which collects all CS Lewis’ references to his Ulster childhood and the possible role of such places in inspiring many of his greatest works. CS Lewis – And The Island Of His Birth, by Sandy Smith, lifts the lid on CS Lewis’ early life in Belfast and allows the reader to walk in Lewis’ footsteps on a journey that covers Belfast and Ireland north and south, encapsulating the places that many believe were the inspiration for some of his greatest works. Lewis mentioned parts of Northern Ireland at various times in his writing. “That...

My dear Wormwood, The collective heads of the Hades High Council is positively spinning with all the news of these foolish earthlings in their desire to find peace, harmony, love and "why can't we all get along" interfaith notions. Their compromises over pansexual behavior have to be one of the single greatest triumphs of the 21st Century. Our Father had to be dragged away from a round of bishop bashing just to hear the good news. Now that both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have succumbed to the notion of civil partnerships while condemning gay marriage is of course...

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew. Excerpts appear below, with Lewis’ writing (complete with Rand’s highlighting and underlining) on the left and...

Sixty years ago, London publisher Geoffrey Bles first released a revision of three sets of radio talks by an Oxford literature don. The book was called Mere Christianity, and there was nothing "mere" about it. A somewhat disjointed set of C. S. Lewis's views on a wide range of theological, philosophical, and ethical matters, the book became the most important and effective defense of the Christian faith in its century. As Mere Christianity (henceforth "MC") goes into its seventh decade of publishing success, rivaled still by no other apologetic, it's worth taking a look at its unlikely success. Why It...

June 13, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When close friends are presented in film or literature today, the conclusion is often: ‘Oh, they are gay.’ One of the tragedies of our culture, in its vigorous acceptance of the homosexual agenda, is the corrosion of a true understanding of friendship. What is ‘Friendship’? Have we lost our concept of it? Today, Friendship is considered either mere casual companionship, or, if it is something deeper, a latent sexual urge. But traditionally, Friendship was neither of these things. In The Four Loves, novelist and philosopher C. S. Lewis describes Friendship as a love in its...