Category Archives: Quotes

Lewis on Originality

MereChristianity_1st_Ed

Mere Christianity, in its published form, is 60 years old this year. But the book was based on BBC radio talks given 8 years earlier during World War II.

Here’s the only recording that remains from the BBC broadcasts. It was recorded on March 21st…

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The only valid thing in art is the one thing that cannot be explained, to explain away the mystery of a great painting would do irreplaceable harm, for whenever you explain or define something you substitute the explanation or definition for the image of the thing. -Henri Matisse

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Cyclops, Open Your Other Eye

cyclops_science copy

Below is a link to a nerd-riffic, truth-filled interview with philosopher and Notre Dame professor Alvin Plantinga about the purported conflict between science and religion. LISTEN HERE; nerd out.

Plantinga gives a great response to the interviewers question: “Is there not a big part of your own personal, religious doctrine that depends on faith, taking a leap of faith, philosophically, and believing in certain things that can’t be scientifically proven?”

“… It’s not as if whatever is true, or sensible to believe has to be provable by virtue of science. Science is absolutely wonderful, but it’s a limited endeavor. It doesn’t cover the whole of the knowledge enterprise you might say.”

Cyber-fist-bump to Prof. Plantinga for not buying into the interviewer’s premise that having faith puts him in an untenable position. Science’s job is to chase down mystery and hogtie it with a lasso of understanding…or whatever. Science is useful when it’s applied to help understand and describe our world, but it becomes oppressive when it seeks to define our world. There is a subtle, but critical difference there old chums…just like the difference between wisdom and knowledge, confidence and arrogance, chapstick and glue stick. Confuse them at your peril.

Science, like art, or any subject, is just one lens on the world. But…

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“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Science & Spirituality Get it on Between the Covers

Scientific Approach

Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. I am not even particularly bright.

Regardless, one reason I think Mere Christianity is such a compelling book is that Lewis took a fairly scientific approach to a spiritual subject. The reader can test his claims because the reader is an intrinsic expert on the subject being examined; he is the subject:

There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

From this intrinsic point of departure, Brother Clive sets out to step the reader through a series of logical paces. Granted, there are critics of these paces who argue that they aren’t logical and would likely say that they’re far from scientific. In the academic sense, they may be right. Who knows; I’m no academic. I suppose some would argue that academic sense is an oxymoron. Anyway, back to what’s important: logic, science, and how to impress the ladies…

This brings me to the next logical subject: Goodwill. Not good will. Goodwill. Where I source all of my yellow-armpitted Reebok t-shirts with stretched-out necks and that…

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BOOM! Christmas.

chesterton

There is something defiant in Christmas also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Read more over here.

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The Indescribable Something

CS Lewis_Chewy Lewis Project

“When I attempted…to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light…For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may …

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Avert Your Eyes

“If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.
- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The clip below makes me want to avert my eyes. What starts out as a great opportunity takes a dive into a shouting match that kind of reminds me of the digressive, aggressive comments that inevitably seem to congregate below most videos on YouTube:

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