The Lewis Legacy-Issue 81, Summer 1999 Notes and Quotes

“When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priest craft; Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes.”

The Allegory of Love — a foretaste of Till We Have Faces?

“I enjoyed myself greatly at Oxford, made friends, talked late into the night, and even worked sometimes, and work included lectures by both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The subject of the lectures and tutorials was always literature or philology — we wouldn’t have dared ask those two great men about their own work! — but the example they set by being both great and serious scholars, and writers of fantasy and books for children was not lost on me.”

Jill Paton Walsh, prizewinning author and friend of Lewis lover Katherine Paterson. “Her writing is studded with allusions to poetry, art and philosophy that give it an intellectual framework unmatched in children’s literature.”

“I recommend against publishing this book, because such honesty and truth-telling could only be destructive.”

A pre-publication response to Thedore Pappas’ 1998 book Plagiarism and the Culture War

“The first thing Christians must do as apostles of the truth is to tell the truth. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck inverts this principle in his study of human evil [The People of the Lie]. He has found in his research and clinical practice that those human beings who, from their hearts, resist the good and prefer evil to a degree notable even among fallen human beings, give themselves away in one particular symptom: they habitually lie. Out of their ‘malignant narcissism,’ or what Cristian tradition has more bluntly called pride, hey refuse to submit to reality, and so they attempt to twist it, to shape it according to their own preferences. They lie even when they don’t have to, because, in a sense, they do have to: they must assert their primacy at all costs, in every instance.”

John G. Stackhouse, Jr.