CS Lewis - Safety and Happiness

"Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other."
CS Lewis

C.S. Lewis - Debunked

"A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional ... values, have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."
C.S. Lewis

CS Lewis home to receive historic landmark status

The Oxford home where Christian scholar and author CS Lewis wrote the popular The Chronicles of Narnia series is to receive historic landmark status.
Lewis lived at The Kilns from 1930 until his death in 1963. It was there that he wrote many of his works, from The Screwtape Letters to the Narnia series.
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board will be unveiling a special blue plaque at The Kilns on Saturday to mark Lewis' contribution to scholarship and literature.
Lewis wrote a total of 40 books in his lifetime but is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, based on four children who lived with Lewis and his family as evacuees during the Second World War. The first instalment of the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was adapted for the silver screen by Disney in 2005. In May 2008, the second book, Prince Caspian, also hit theatres.
Although his children's fiction books were extremely popular, Lewis was also highly regarded as a Christian apologist. Lewis' books, including Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and Miracles, which responded to common objections to Christianity, proved him to be one of the most influential Christian apologists of his time. To date, his books have sold over 100 million copies.
"We have very stringent rules and only award blue plaques for the highest level of achievement," says Eda Forbes, secretary to the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques, which recognises famous residences in Oxford with a permanently-installed plaque.
The Kilns is now a Christian study centre owned by the CS Lewis Foundation in California.
Stan Mattson, founder and president of the CS Lewis Foundation, and Walter Hooper, Lewis' former secretary and literary advisor to his estate, will join in the unveiling of the plaque.
The plaque will be the latest addition to the restored Kilns, that still houses the period wardrobe that inspired the magical portal in Lewis' Narnia story.

C.S. Lewis - The Universe

The very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must have always been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

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C.S. Lewis - Humility

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good, if bad, because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
C.S. Lewis

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CS Lewis - What creature are you going to be?

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And, taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature -- either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

CS Lewis - Go into the world

Jesus Christ did not say, "Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right."
C.S. Lewis

Human Teacher or Lunatic?

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic - on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg - or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse... But don't let us come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He hadn't left that open to us. He didn't intend to.
-- Lewis, C. S.

CS Lewis

The sort of love I have been describing... can also be felt for bodies that claim more than a natural affection: for a Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a religious order. This terrible subject would require a book to itself. Here it will be enough to say that the Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not going to write is written, it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of "the World" will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.

CS Lewis

There was in their city a bronze image of Moloch extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.

CS Lewis

"Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other."

CS Lewis

"This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people."