He doesn’t know Jack, cont’d

My post on what Richard Wolffe doesn’t know about C.S. Lewis prompted responses that I thought might be of interest to readers. Kent Dahlberg writes:

We read and refer to C.S. Lewis a lot around Dartmouth — and not primarily his The Chronicles of Narnia. That said, even Lewis’s Narnia series is profound, if you have “eyes to see and ears to hear.” Through those children’s books Lewis is conveying the beauty, mystery, majesty, and paradoxes of Christian faith and practice in an imaginary setting — one that speaks to a child in ways he or she can more readily comprehend. Transcending its younger audience, the Narnia series also offers thoughtful adults a rich trove of theological teaching, practical wisdom and divine inspiration — albeit on an entirely different plane than it offers a child.
Last but not least, from a biblical frame of reference, children are often more honest, clear-thinking, self-giving, and responsive to God than we jaded grown-ups. Hence, “childlikeness” in appropriate areas of our adult lives can be a moral virtue and godly compliment. In contrast, the self-important haughtiness on display in that “Hardball” discussion illustrates a form of human vanity and folly that Scriptural teaching routinely condemns. C.S. Lewis combined an inquisitive, creative mind with brilliant use of language, expressed through a child-like spirit that only grew more compelling with age and burnished by his griefs. That is why, nearly 50 years after his death, hundreds of millions of people around the world still read C.S. Lewis today.
Something tells me the legacies of Chris Matthews and Richard Wolfe will not fare as well against the ravages of time.

Laurce Zuriff writes:

If Palin has ever read the “The Inner Ring (Making Good Men Do Bad Things)” she is definitely better prepared to understand public service than most.

“The Inner Ring” is collected in The Weight of Glory, another one of Lewis’s books of Christian reflection with which Richard Wolffe is unfamiliar.
Reader Rich Cochran comments on my praise of The Abolition of Man:

Exactly correct!
My friend Dr. Richard Baer used The Abolition of Man in his Cornell course, “Religion, Ethics, and the Environment”. The audio of his lectures is available in downloadable MP3 format here. I highly recommend his lectures to you. At least read the descriptions.

I should add that the text of The Abolition of Man has been posted online here with notes by the Augustine Club of Columbia University.
Andrew Mays writes from Maine with our exit question:

I always get a kick out of smarty pants liberals looking down their noses at me (as a hunter).
I watched the Hardball clip about Sarah on a hunt. I was reading your comments as the video played so I wasn’t 100 percent focused but I’m pretty sure she shot a Caribou (I’ve taken moose and deer). Besides being a tv show, it was a guided hunt, which is very common. The panel, tripping over themselves to tell the viewers why she is no hunter, can’t even get the species right!
……and C.S. Lewis is a children’s author?
Exactly what is the field of their expertise??

Which gives us the appropriate note on which to end the discussion….

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