New Editions

Nelson is now offering four giftbook collections of C. S. Lewis quotations on special themes: Grief, Faith, Love, and Joy. Each $9.99 72-page hardcover has full-color illustrations and photos, The Southern Baptist publisher Broadman & Holman now distributes 11 attractive Lewis trade paperbacks and anthologies to Christian bookstores:

• The Abolition of Man, 112 pp., $6.
• The Case for Christianity, 64 pp.. $6.
• The Essential C. S. Lewis, 560 pp., $15.
• The Great Divorce, 128 pp., $7.
• The Joyful Christian, 256 pp., $10.
• Letters to Children, 128 pp., $8.
• Mere Christianity, 192 pp., $7.
• Miracles, 240 pp., $7.
• The Problem of Pain, 144 pp., $7.
• The Screwtape Letters, 128 pp., $7.
• The Visionary Christian, 288 pp., $12.

FACTS, MYTHS, WHATEVER…

In “The Last Romantic” (May 1998 issue of Foundations), James Patrick (a Roman Catholic theologian in Texas) reports that Lewis is “the staple of an entire chain of bookstores.” (What chain is that?)

“As a boy he had discovered joy, a joy of a purely natural kind, rooted in the land of Boxen…” (Isn’t this the opposite of Lewis’s account?)

“When Evangelicals and Pentecostals, among whom Lewis’s influence is probably greater even than with Anglicans, read Pilgrim’s Regress or Screwtape, they are often not aware that they are reading works formed not only by the Bible but by that philosophy they sometimes call vain, and by the thought of a succession that includes St. Athanasius, now cast in bronze and holding aloft Peter’s chair…” (First, few U. S. Pentecostals read Lewis. Second, few Evangelicals read Regress. Third, readers of Regress don’t think it is formed “only by the Bible” and don’t call historic Christian philosophy “vain.”)

Such misconceptions are surprising from the co-editor of A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honour of C.S. Lewis.

C. S. LEWIS BOOK REDIRECTS DOMINO PIZZA FORTUNE

When Detroit four-year-old Thomas Monagham’s truckdriver father died, his mother placed him in foster homes first, then into a kindly Roman Catholic orphanage. He was embarrassed by his childhood poverty and longed to become rich. As a very young man he entered seminary but was expelled for pillowfighting and whispering in chapel. Later he had to drop out of Michigan State University to earn money to continue, and so he borrowed $900 and bought a small pizza shop. That was the end of college. Thirty-five years later he had expanded to 6,100 outlets worldwide.

One evening in 1989, when he was 54, Monagham read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. “I lay awake virtually all night. I realized I had more pride than any person I knew.” The next morning he was a changed man. He began selling the material trappings of his success — his helicopter, his corporate jet, his prize automobiles, his boat, his beloved Frank Lloyd Wright collection. He moved out of his elegant $2 million office. In September 1998 he sold Domino Pizza for about $1 billion. Why is he liquidating most of his assets? For philanthropy. Observers expect most of his fortune to go into Roman Catholic schools.

It seems ironic that the heart of a U. S. pizza baron was so responsive to Lewis’s message that his fortune is now devoted to charity, but that those who have handled Lewis’s literary legacy since Warren Lewis’s death in 1973 are so impervious to Lewis’s message that none of the fortune earned by his writing goes to charity as he intended. According to the 4 October 1998 Sunday Times article about Monagham, Lewis’s books sell two million copies yearly in the U. S. alone.