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Particularly since the dawn of the 20th century, Judeo-Christian archetypes and imagery have stirred the American imagination, as reflected in these 10 films on Disney Plus. One can only speculate what British author C.S. Lewis, who spent his boyhood in rural Ireland a century ago, would think of today’s WiFi-enabled home entertainment revolution. Doubtless, the Christian apologist would be curious to see movie versions of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — his best-selling mythic allegories grounded in virtues and sacraments — on Disney Plus. The streaming service has two big-budget Narnia adaptations listed right between modern updates on Winnie the Pooh...

The theologian and author C.S. Lewis identifies three enemies we face during crises such as ours and mental exercises to defend against each. In the autumn of 1939, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland and ignited the fuse of World War II, the great British theologian C. S. Lewis preached a sermon called “Learning in War-Time.” Although written 81 years ago, his advice is perhaps more relevant today than ever.Lewis identifies three enemies facing students during crises such as ours and mental exercises to defend against each. His thought are also helpful to those who are not students.The first enemy is...

The titles lining the shelves labeled “fiction” in your typical evangelical bookstore will not be sold in a hundred years. Those novels will never be taught in a college classroom as literature, and they will never transform anyone’s heart, mind, or soul. Rather, those books are meant preach to the choir. And, I mean preach. The reason that Protestants do not create as much literature as their Catholic counterparts has more to do with ecclesiastical habits than with theology. While there are many Protestants who have written phenomenal novels (Marilynne Robinson comes to everyone’s minds, but also think of Larry...

Do you remember what you were doing the day Aldous Huxley died? Or C.S. Lewis? You don’t think so? Well, the odds are that if you were old enough to be laying down memories at the time, you do. Because it was also the day President Kennedy was assassinated. There’s no evidence that Huxley read Lewis, or that Kennedy read either—though his wife Jackie would certainly have read some of their books—but Lewis knew enough of Huxley to mention him in a letter of 1952 as an author of a future dystopia alongside H.G. Wells and George Orwell. The mental...

When C.S. Lewis Predicted Our Doom He worried about a dystopian future in which man tries to play God and fails. Whose dystopia are we living in today? With Donald Trump as president and the world seemingly ablaze, answering that question can sometimes feel like gambling on a horse race. So bet big on George Orwell, as ChinaÂ’s terrifying social credit system makes his Nineteen Eighty-Four freshly relevant. Though the odds are still good on Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World offers the timeless warning that sexual and chemical freedom can actually be tools of subjugation. And here comes Margaret...

A man sets himself on fire Wednesday on the Ellipse in downtown Washington, across from the White House, the Secret Service said. A spokesman for the Washington Fire Department tells CNBC, “I can confirm that we’ve transported one patient with burns from the Ellipse and we’re now on the scene assisting law enforcement,” referring to Park Police and U.S. Secret Service officers. Alina Berzins says she was visiting the National Mall with two of her cousins from Bolivia when “we saw this man” on the Ellipse and “he starts running, and then we saw him covered in flames.”

When the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” comes on the pre-show soundtrack, it’s a tipoff that C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is going to be a diabolically delightful evening of theater and infernally amusing. The script is deftly adapted for the stage by Max McLean (who also directs) and Jeffrey Fiske from Lewis’ popular epistolary novel wherein the moral universe is turned upside down: God is “The Enemy” and the Devil-in-chief is “Our Father.” The Screwtape Letters is obliquely a story about the vicissitudes of faith and the joke is that it’s set in Hell, where Screwtape is a...

I'm a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Ivor do...

Among C.S.Lewis’ best writings is his essay about insider cabals. Entitled The Inner Ring, it can be read here on the website of the C.S. Lewis Society of California. Lewis begins with a quotation from Tolstoy’s War and Peace...

MINAS TIRITH, GONDOR—Kicking off a major trade war between the two kingdoms, the Middle-Earth Trade Federation has announced heavy tariffs on the import of Narnian steel, sending the stock market into a freefall Thursday.Any steel imported from Narnia to Gondor, Rohan, Erebor, or Mirkwood will be subject to a 30% tax. The move is expected to raise the end consumer price of various imported goods significantly, according to expert economists working at Rivendell.“Trade wars are great, and they’re really easy to win,” the king of Gondor said in a dispatch via carrier pigeon. “If we keep allowing cheap Narnian steel...

We must never forget that at this time of year, we celebrate much more than a birthday. As the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis put it, Christmas is the story of how “the rightful King has landed.” When Jesus stood before the Roman governor Pilate, just prior to going to His execution, Pilate asked Him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” After some discussion Pilate concluded to Jesus, “You are a king, then!” Jesus answered him, saying, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came...

Originally an atheist, C.S. Lewis credited his Catholic colleague at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien, whom he met in 1926, as being instrumental in his coming to faith in Jesus Christ. *snip C.S. Lewis wrote: “The best popular defense of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Everlasting Man.'” In “Surprised by Joy,” 1955, C.S. Lewis described how he resisted “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape,” until in 1929 he came to believe in God: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen (College, Oxford) night after...

Subtitle: Cue up Pajama Boy. The great crimes of the Left begin in the public school student’s earliest years, when they work to snuff out of Love of Country. On July 4th I watched a clip from Democracy Now, a progressive TV news show hosted by Pacifica’s Amy Goodman. While I didn’t expect to watch stirring renditions from our Founding Era, I was taken aback by a segment devoted to the Leftist historian and author Howard Zinn. In A People’s History of the United States (1980), which is required reading in many high schools and universities, students are pummeled with...

Video LinkIf you want to skip the Preface and Foreword, the first chapter starts at the 16:25 mark.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable...

Mid-twentieth-century C. S. Lewis witnessed and wrote about the increasing moral breakdown and intellectual decay of Western civilization. He observed how secular and atheistic academics, philosophers, politicians, intellectuals, and cultural elites abandoned reason, denied universal truths, undermined Christian doctrines, and rejected moral principles that formed the foundation of civilized society. "Lewis walked our cultural ground," explained Chris R. Armstrong. "He lived, as we do, in a society that denied objective value; lacked a coherent social ethic; wallowed in instant gratification, sexual license, moral evasion, and blame-shifting; and failed to pass on a moral framework to its children." In his book...

"If you ever doubt that C. S. Lewis was gifted with a prophetic voice, you need look no further for correction than Prince Caspian. In the story, you may remember, Narnia is in a desperate situation. The Telmarines have taken over, and the citizens of Narnia have been persecuted, silenced, and driven into hiding. When Prince Caspian—a Telmarine himself, but one who sympathizes with the Narnian cause—joins forces with them, this leads to a fresh round of attacks from the other Telmarines and their king, Miraz. The Narnians try to summon help by using Queen Susan’s horn—and they are successful,...

 When events at Yale University and the University of Missouri propelled college politics to national news, many conservatives were caught off guard by the power of "political correctness." To those familiar with the works of C.S. Lewis, however, these events were of little surprise. Lewis's The Abolition of Man explains both the confusion and the radical ideology on campuses today, and how Americans should respond to these dire threats.What's Happening on College Campuses?In the September issue of The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, described a...

I was recently asked my opinion about the current state of affairs, and thought some of you might be interested. Or not. ===================================================== Hi Cousin You asked my thoughts about Paris, so here they are. What we are seeing is not a clash of civilizations, but rather a clash between civilization and barbarism. Paris is but the latest consequence of The West 1) failing to recognize/address barbarism, and 2) losing faith in civilization itself. In short, Paris is the well-deserved consequence of The West's aggregate contempt for its own Christian heritage. G.K. Chesterton once said that when a people no...

Two authors who collectively have sold hundreds of millions of copies of their books decades after their deaths receive scant attention in academia. C. S. Lewis, according to Publisher’s Weekly, had sold 18 million copies by 2013. J. R. R. Tolkien, according to answers.com, has sold about 250 million copies. But try finding a panel on either of them at the Modern Language Association. Perhaps it has something to do with the outlook of this literary pair. Indeed, even during their lifetimes, despite spending most of their working lives as Oxford dons, both Lewis and Tolkien were more widely appreciated...