"Friendship, family, community..."

A young traditionalist finds contemporary conservatism wanting—too libertarian and too materialist—and commends "The Radicalism of Russell Kirk." The essay is a very good introduction to the "Kirkian" variety of conservatism. The final paragraphs:

My generation has seen the West undone by consumerism, lax divorce laws, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization. All are defended (even if only half-heartedly) by modern conservatives as “the price we must pay” to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. Liberty without morality is mere license; prosperity without charity is mere decadence. The traditionalist rejects both perversions while upholding the essential Good that they distort.

To quote Burke: “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” And what is it that Millennial traditionalists want? Friendship, family, community, an honest day’s work, real music, good books, and above all God. Kirk summed it up very nicely when he said that “conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship, and Christians call love of neighbor.”

This is the radical vision he posited against the “dreams of avarice” shared by socialists, progressives, and libertarians. This is what conservatives once fought for. We’ve abdicated that duty in the decades since Kirk’s death, but a new generation of conservatives is taking up the fight again.

The Radicalism of Russell Kirk | The American Conservative

"A pointer to...deeper sources of wisdom"

This review of the Library of America collection of Madeleine L’Engle reflects on her "Moral Reasoning in an Acceptable Time":

.... Whether or not her characters experience something as overtly supernatural as time or space travel, L’Engle’s concern lies not merely with the social and developmental struggles faced by teenagers, but with their spiritual lives. Just as Meg must learn to love in A Wrinkle in Time and the volumes of the earlier quartet, her daughter Polly O’Keefe must learn forgiveness in the later quartet. The final book, An Acceptable Time, culminates with Polly forgiving the offenses of a young man described as having been “out of [his] mind with self.” A wise elder character tells him, in language echoing Scripture: “Ultimately you will die to this life.” This unapologetically religious stance, along with L’Engle’s willingness to combine genres, kill characters, and quote difficult literature, doubtless accounts for both the enduring success of her works and their initial difficulty in finding a publisher, with A Wrinkle in Time famously having been rejected more than twenty times.

On these matters L’Engle’s Christianity is both overtly present—among L’Engle’s frequent quotations are many drawn from Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and Christian mystics—and diffused throughout the imagery and symbol systems of the novels. ....

In this, L’Engle aligns closely with Tolkien and his associates among the Inklings. ....

For all L’Engle’s explicit spirituality, her works show a greater comfort with the Modern Moral Order than one might expect from a writer so often associated with the antimodern Inklings. For all her explicit Christianity, L’Engle also endorses a modern, liberal form of the religion. This is illustrated most infamously in A Wrinkle in Time as the protagonists list those who have made the greatest contributions against the powers of a darkness, a list that begins with Jesus Christ and continues to Leonard da Vinci, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, Buddha, and Copernicus. L’Engle features clerics in more than one novel (themselves somewhat non-modern figures by virtue of their role), but their wisdom tends to favor modern dogma, as when Bishop Colubra of An Acceptable Time blandly asserts that “yesterday’s heresy becomes tomorrow’s dogma.”

Ultimately the spiritual values L’Engle aims at tend toward those that are uncontroversial in the Modern Moral Order: A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door endorse love over hate, Dragons in the Waters challenges greed and environmental destruction, and An Acceptable Time provides a lesson against selfishness. ....

In contrast with her character’s banal pronouncements about tolerance, kindness, and consent, the traditional Christian language L’Engle weaves throughout these books stands out with all the more clarity. When Bishop Colubra quotes the psalmist—“O Lord, I make my prayer to you in an acceptable time”—or the hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” the strength and richness of the traditional language makes his own modern vocabulary seem facile by contrast. It is no coincidence that the strongest of these eight novels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, featuring the most vivid and emotionally satisfying characters in the sequence, is structured and saturated with the language of L’Engle’s version of the ancient prayer “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” ....

If L’Engle finally lacks the moral and imaginative resources to escape the linguistic confines of the Modern Moral Order, her work nonetheless points young readers to a treasury of richer language, both in classic literature and the hymns and prayers of the ancient Christian church. Maybe, for young readers already fostering a suspicion that the modern project may not be all it claims to be, she can serve as a pointer to these deeper sources of wisdom. A person could do worse. (more)

Moral Reasoning in an Acceptable Time | The Russell Kirk Center

"Salvator Mundi"

A Facebook friend posted a gorgeous version of this Tallis composition today. I went looking for a translation of the text and while looking around on YouTube found another performance that I liked:

O Saviour of the world, save us, who by Thy cross and blood hast redeemed us, Save us and help us, we humbly beseech Thee, O Lord.

Thomas Tallis, 1575

"O who am I, that for my sake My Lord should take frail flesh and die?"

Jonathan Aigner has been posting hymns for each Sunday in Lent. This Sunday he posts "My Song Is Love Unknown" with what I assume are all of its verses, many more than I had known. Below is a performance I have posted on this site before:

My song is love unknown, My Saviour’s love to me; Love to the loveless shown, That they might lovely be. O who am I, that for my sake My Lord should take frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne Salvation to bestow; But men made strange, and none The longed-for Christ would know: But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed, Who at my need His life did spend.

Here might I stay and sing, No story so divine; Never was love, dear King! Never was grief like Thine. This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend.

Samuel Crossman, 1664

Fifth Sunday in Lent: My Song Is Love Unknown | Jonathan Aigner

American history

I taught US History classes in secondary schools for thirty-five years. I never had the privilege of choosing the textbook. Invariably the ones chosen were dry, uninspired, and boring. This one might be different. From a review of Land of Hope:

.... After a beautifully written introduction, “Beginnings: Settlement and Unsettlement” starts with the first human settlers in the new world—twenty to thirty thousand years ago—and ends with Christopher Columbus’ four trips from Spain to the Americas starting in 1492.

McClay’s treatment of Columbus and his discoveries is illustrative of his even-handed approach:

Columbus had trouble seeing America for the new thing that it was, and could be, and eventually would become. He was not first, and he would not be the last. It is part of the human condition, and a recurrent feature of human history, that what we find is not always what we were looking for, and what we accomplish is not always what we set out to do.

Hence, too, the reality that Columbus’s journeys were also the beginning of a great collision of cultures, a process that nearly always entails tragic and bitter consequences. Hence the cruel irony, as we shall see, that the settlement of America by newcomers would also produce a profound unsettlement for those who were not newcomers. The fresh start for the world came at a heavy price for those who were already settled on the land, men and women for whom San Salvador was not a New World being discovered but an old and familiar world about to be transformed.

The book then catalogs American history from “The Shaping of British North America” to “The World Since the Cold War” over 22 chapters. The text ends with an epilogue on “The Shape of American Patriotism.” It also includes an excellent list of works for further reading. ....

Land of Hope is the kind of book I wish I’d had for my own Advanced Placement U.S. History course back in high school. I don’t remember now which book was used, but it was dull and uninspiring. It distilled the great American story into boring lists of facts and “concepts” to memorize. Land of Hope includes the same material, but in a much more engaging and naturally memorable way. Reading it is inspirational rather than merely a chore.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that Land of Hope will be widely adopted. With today’s politicized and “internationalized” AP U.S. History curriculum, Land of Hope would be a poor fit.

Instead, parents and grandparents who care about their children’s understanding of their own country and culture should purchase Land of Hope as a supplement to the history that students learn in school.

Professor Mark Bauerlein puts it better than I can in his panegyric to the book:

This book is THE antidote to abysmal levels of historical knowledge our high school graduates possess. History bores them; the textbooks are dreary; lessons play up guilt and identity politics. It turns them off. They want powerful tales and momentous events, genuine heroes and villains, too—an accurate but stirring rendition of the past. This is Bill McClay’s Land of Hope, a superb historian’s version of the American story, in lively prose spiced with keen analysis and compelling drama. Every school that assigns this book will see students’ eyes brighten when the Civil War comes up, the Progressive Era, the Depression, Civil Rights…The kids want an authentic, meaningful heritage, a usable past. McClay makes it real. ....

Perhaps also for home-schoolers?

The book will be published in May so I haven't had a chance to look at it. It is available at Amazon for pre-order.

A History Textbook that Inspires, Not Lectures, Students about America — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Unromantic

Netflix produced and is streaming a film called The Highwaymen about the lawmen pursuing Bonnie and Clyde. My brother and I watched it last Friday evening. It is far more accurate history than any other dramatic portrayal thus far, especially the 1967 movie. From a review of The Highwaymen :

.... Retelling Bonnie and Clyde from the point of view of the actual heroes of the story is a superb idea that took far too long to come to screen. Hired by the governor of Texas, “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates), aging ex-Rangers Frank Hamer (Costner) and Maney Gault (Harrelson) are given a special mandate to end a reign of terror that left 13 people dead, yet was celebrated as a romantic tale of sexy desperadoes who were folk heroes to the newspapers of the Great Depression and later easily adapted into symbols of Sixties liberation.

Channeling Hamer’s rage and disgust, The Highwaymen attacks the myth of Bonnie and Clyde, who are seen only in glimpses. Far from robbing banks on behalf of hapless victims of the Depression, the Barrow gang mostly stuck to soft targets such as gas stations and grocery stores. Yet ordinary Americans were enthralled by the rebel legends and are seen concealing information to cover for the killers — though they were cheap, vicious cowards who would do anything for a buck. Governor Ferguson (Kathy Bates) replies to reporters pushing the Robin Hood narrative, “Did Robin Hood ever shoot a gas station attendant in the head for four dollars and a tank of gas?” .... (more)

From Commentary in 2009:

...Hamer was almost a prototype of the kind of man the Boomer generation would be taught to distrust, both in life and in fiction. Almost insanely brave and almost unbelievably tough, he was Texas’s most famous man hunter. He wouldn’t sell his life story to the movies; he was too dignified, too suspicious of the alien (even then) West Coast culture and of “dramatic license.” But if he had, John Wayne would have played him, with all 50 of his shoot-outs accounted for, as well as his numerous wounds.

The Duke would have been portrayed standing up against lynch mobs murderously incensed by African-Americans...uncovering murderous bounty-hunter schemes. And Wayne would have yelled out fair warning to the pair, as both he and another posse member, the selfsame Ted Hinton, claimed occurred in their written accounts of the incident. And the Duke would have replicated Hamer’s odd body posture so evident in the photographs, his almost contemptuous slouch, off center always and listing one way or the other as he refuses to look at the lens, sucking on an always-present tailor-made cigarette.

That movie, however, certainly could not have been made in 1967 and it certainly can’t be made in 2009 [but has been made in 2019] : Hamer is too straight, too commanding, too uncompromising for such a treatment. The irony is that Hamer is forgotten while Clyde and Bonnie live on. Hamer stood for something: the idea of right and the guts to make it stick. Clyde and Bonnie stood for nothing, except perhaps infantile nihilism, unformed, incoherent, vicious. If they were ambushed without warning, it’s because each had weapons at hand, and so they wouldn’t widow and orphan other police families. If they were shot to pieces, it’s because the old-time law enforcement guys knew you shot them, and then you shot them some more.

Hamer stands for your grandfather’s authority, annoyance at fools, and the willingness to kill in the belief that he was saving the weak by eliminating their predator. He was a righteous killer, a dinosaur whose time has passed. ....

“The Highwaymen” Review: Netflix Movie Punctures Bonnie & Clyde Myths | National Review, Clyde and Bonnie Died for Nihilism - Commentary

Emmylou

Emmylou Harris was born on this date in 1947. I started buying her albums in the 1970s. I've seen her perform twice, once at Milwaukee's Summerfest, and once at what was then the Milwaukee Auditorium, backed that time by the Hot Band which included Ricky Skaggs. A collection of Emmylou singing gospel from YouTube:

Relevant now more than ever

"Prone to wander..."

Jonathan Aigner has been posting hymns for each Sunday in Lent. Today he chose "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." It's a great hymn. I don't use the video he chose but I like it, especially the organ.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace; Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by Thy help I’m come; And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God; He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be! Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.

Joy

The author of my newly acquired book about C.S. Lewis keeps quoting from his poems. It has been a very long time since I opened Poems, collected and edited by Walter Hooper. In the chapter I'm reading today this one came up:

THE DAY WITH A WHITE MARK (1949)

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness: Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave Of a journeying angel's transit roaring over and through my heart?

My garden's spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden; The plann'd and unplann'd miseries deepen; the knots draw tight. Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season. It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I—I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of My day was like a peacock's chest. In at each sense there stole Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there, And shining roots worked visibly far down below one's feet, So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale, Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children's tale.

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes? No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

Why?

An interesting response to a New York Times op-ed:

“Why is there anything rather than nothing?” Accept the question as a koan, not a challenge to debate, and you will have a mystical experience, although you may need to walk away from your screen, still your mind, and sit alone quietly in your room for a few minutes before the strange wonder that the question points to begins to register.

The “answer” to the question is not a proposition. It’s an experience — of astonishment, as you stop in your tracks before the inscrutable reality that things .... exist, your own self being the thing you feel most keenly. You didn’t will yourself into existence. How did you get here? Look to your parents, and from there to their parents, and so on, back to...primordial dust? The Big Bang? Bracket for a moment the question of what we should call the thing where that regression into the past comes to its final stop. Bracket the question of what the thing is exactly. That it was there, rather than not there — that’s the stubborn mystery.

Give a non-theistic cosmologist that one free miracle, the mystery of being, and he’ll explain the rest. The rest is what he’s interested in anyway. Those who dwell on the one free miracle, meanwhile, are liable to find that it never gets old, that it moves them on occasion to blurt, mentally or out loud, something like “Oh my God.”

Did someone say “God”? Here we go. .... (more)

Atheism: Philosopher Peter Atterton Sidesteps the Heart of the Matter | National Review

Wishing the worst

Always relevant, but this week especially so:

.... Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. ....

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, "Forgiveness."

A short introduction

C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como from Oxford University Press just arrived in the mail. I'm looking forward to enjoying it. OUP also allows you to download it free if you're willing to register with them and provide credit card information (which they promise not to use). Here is the URL: Download [PDF] CS Lewis A Very Short Introduction Free Online. I purchased mine in paperback from Amazon.

From the online description:

.... Although he is best known for the iconic Chronicles of Narnia series, C.S. Lewis was actually a man of many literary parts. Already well-known as a scholar in the thirties, he became a famous broadcaster during World War Two and wrote in many genres, including satire (The Screwtape Letters), science fiction ( Perelandra), a novel (Till We Have Faces), and many other books on Christian belief, such as Mere Christianity and Miracles. His few sermons remain touchstones of their type. In addition to these, Lewis wrote hundreds of poems and articles on social and cultural issues, many books and articles in his field of literary criticism and history, and thousands of letters. At Oxford University he became a charismatic lecturer and conversationalist. Taken together his writings have engaged and influenced, often very deeply, millions of readers. Now Lewis societies, television documentaries, movies, radio plays, and theatrical treatments of his work and life have become common, and he is frequently quoted by journalists, critics, and public thinkers. This Very Short Introduciton delves into the vast corpus of C.S. Lewis' work, discussing its core themes and lasting appeal. As James Como shows, C.S. Lewis' life is just as interesting as his work. A complex man, he came to his knowledge, beliefs, and wisdom only after much tortuous soul-searching and many painful events. Moving chronologically through Lewis' life, Como provides throughout a picture of the whole man, his work, and his enduring legacy. ....

"All get what they want; they do not always like it."

A nice discovery this morning. This person has re-read all of the The Chronicles of Narnia in publication order (the correct order) and, instead of writing a critical essay, collected "My Favorite Narnia Quotes." If you've read the books you will enjoy these reminders. A few of the quotations follow but all of them can be found here.

• At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.

• “Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
  “That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
  “Not because you are?”
  “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

• “He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven’t.”
• After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head [of a school], so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
• “She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
• But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
• And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

My Favorite Narnia Quotes – The King and His Kingdom

"Even darkness must pass"

Sam: It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

The Uses of Enchantment ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Personal libraries

"National Review asked some writers and collectors to describe their personal libraries." Excerpts from some of the responses:

Some of my books

Joseph Epstein: On two separate occasions I radically cut back my personal library, lest it take over my apartment. Each time, like the detached tail of the iguana, it grew back. No matter my efforts at literary population control, my books seemed relentlessly to multiply. ....

Micah Mattix: I can’t remember when I first started keeping books. I was not an insatiable reader growing up, but I held on to my Narnia and Hardy Boys for a while — I can see them now on the inset shelf in my childhood bedroom — until I either gave them away or lost them. Of Mice and Men was an early favorite, but my original copy of that is gone, too.

I suppose I first started consciously collecting books my first or second year in college, when I decided not to sell back my course texts at the end of the semester. ....

Otto Penzler: .... I quickly concede that the books I chose to collect are relatively frivolous, but mystery fiction has produced extraordinarily poetic prose while turning a spotlight on the world as it was when the works were published. ....

I started to collect right after college, so it adds up to 55 years of what soon became obsessive behavior. I’d read virtually no detective stories as a youngster but at 20 started with The Complete Sherlock Holmes (which should be required reading in every high school in America), and then moved on to the puzzles designed by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and their devious compatriots. When introduced to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, I realized that there were crime writers who deserved to be taken seriously as literary figures. ....

Terry Teachout: Because I keep books that I find rereadable, I usually own several books per author. One shelf is devoted to M.F.K. Fisher, John P. Marquand, and Anthony Powell, while another bulges with Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm. My literary taste is moderately Anglophilic: Kingsley Amis, Somerset Maugham, Barbara Pym, and P.G. Wodehouse all take up plenty of space on the shelves.... (more, possibly behind a paywall)

National Review's Personal Libraries

Bach

On the 334^th anniversary of his birth, Bach:Cantata No 147, "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben," (28 min.):


Happy I, who has Jesus,
  O how tightly I cling to Him,
so that He delights my heart
when I am sick and sad.
I have Jesus, who loves me
and gives Himself to me as my own;
Ah, therefore I will not let go of Jesus,
even if my heart is breaking.

Who created God?

After I posted about John Lennox the other day a friend mentioned that he is on YouTube. Today HillFaith linked to this Lennox video:

The Stone Table

A new, but unauthorised, Narnia novel we may never get to read:

Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke

Francis Spufford has taken a break from writing award-winning adult literature to fill in the details of what exactly went on in Narnia before The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But he isn’t expecting his novel, set in C.S. Lewis’s magical world, to be published any time soon. ....

“I was a deeply, passionately Narnia-loving child myself,” Spufford said, “and I’d always wanted there to be one more novel. Not that I had a specific gap in mind, I just wanted to stay in Narnia a little longer.”

The series is “finished as it stands” he continued, “but there is a gap in the history of Narnia between The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. That was the only gap I thought was large enough for someone to do some impertinent fiddling.” ....

The Stone Table follows Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke, who watch Aslan sing Narnia into being in The Magician’s Nephew, as they return to Narnia. Spufford said he was cautious in giving clues as to what happens in the adventure, but the novel “explains why there are four empty thrones in the castle of Cair Paravel, and where the Stone Table came from”. ....

The much-loved world of Aslan is under copyright until 2034. After finishing the novel, Spufford made a “tentative” approach to ask the Lewis estate if they might agree to publication, but did not receive a reply. Eventually he printed up 75 copies and started giving them to friends. According to the writer Adam Roberts, the novel is “superb”, a rare match of literary ability and authorial sensibility. .... (more)

Alan Jacobs has read the book: "I had the privilege of reading Francis Spufford’s The Stone Table in draft, with what I believe the enthusiasts call 'dawning wonder,' and also with increasing frustration at a copyright regime that made it unlikely to be published." Jacobs writes:

The Stone Table features characters who appear in other Narnia books: most notably, two children named Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke and the great lion Aslan. The seven Narnia books that Lewis wrote have already come into the public domain in some countries, and may even do so in the United States — though those of us who have seen the law extend copyright again and again may be pardoned for doubting that it will ever happen. But Spufford has written a new Narnia story, so copyright law doesn’t affect his: what matters is that the world of Narnia is a registered trademark of C.S. Lewis (PTE.) Ltd. — and trademarks, if they are consistently used and defended against infringement, last forever. ....

The Stone Table deserves a very wide readership indeed. Spufford has suppressed his own distinctive and eloquent style and made himself a ventriloquist of Lewis: to read the story is really and truly to return to the Narnia millions of readers love. And this is not merely a matter of style: Spufford’s story is thematically and even theologically Lewisian. It is a marvelous and utterly delightful tale, as wise as it is thrilling. I so wish you could read it. (more)

Richard Lea, "Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel," The Guardian, March 19, 2019, Alan Jacobs, "a return to Narnia," Snakes and Ladders, March 19, 2019.

"The end product of a blind, unguided process"

I don't believe I'd ever heard of this apologist. From "John Lennox: Oxford Math Professor Defends Christianity":

.... By the time Lennox arrived at Cambridge University as an undergraduate in 1962, he already had devoured many of Lewis’s writings. He couldn’t resist sneaking out of his math lectures to hear Lewis lecture on John Donne before a packed auditorium.

More than any other thinker, it was Lewis — an atheist who converted to Christianity with the help of J.R.R. Tolkien — who gave Lennox the conceptual tools to confront the materialist objections to faith in God. “I thought it was very important to try to walk inside the shoes of someone who knew atheism from the inside, and Lewis provided that guide to me,” he says. “In all his questioning, there was the slow development of his impression that there was a God who could be taken seriously. All of that became very important to me.”

Now, at 75, Lennox has distinguished himself internationally for his intellectual defense of Christianity. He has debated — and, according to his admirers, bested — celebrated atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. A fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford, he writes books that explore the essential compatibility between the scientific quest, rightly understood, and religious belief. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo: All believed in a God who created and sustained the universe. “Instead of the founders of modern science being hindered by their belief in God,” Lennox reminds me, “their belief in God was the motor that drove their science.” ....

Lennox discerns in this a self-defeating materialism. In books such as God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? he argues that the scientist’s confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. “If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you’re going to invalidate the reasoning process,” he says, “because in the end you’re going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that’s the case, why should you trust it?” .... (more)

John Lennox: Oxford Math Professor Defends Christianity | National Review