The Politics of Revelation and Reason
In recent years, controversies over abortion, school prayer, and religious cults have raised new questions about the delicate balance between church and state, between true believers and civic authority. John West shows that America’s Founders had already anticipated and answered such questions by carefully defining religion’s proper role in politics. West sheds new light on how the Founders tried to Read More ›
The Man Who Offered to Eat The Dark Tower Ms.
It seemed ironic enough that in 1990 Collins (publisher of most C. S. Lewis books) paid biographer A. N. Wilson a small fortune to trash Lewis, and in 1995 Oxford University Press (publisher of six Lewis books) brought out John Goldthwaite’s Natural History of Make-Believe, trashing Lewis. An odd way for even the most cynical publishers to treat one of Read More ›
C. S. Lewis and “The Seeing Eye” (1963)
“Looking for God — or Heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff Read More ›
Who Is the Real Author? A Computer Finds Out
In January 1996 Primary Colors, the anonymous novel by a political insider, was released by Random House. Thanks in part to curiosity about the author, it was on the New York Times best-seller list 20 weeks, nine weeks as number one. At mid-year 1.2 million hardbacks had sold, and it was being translated into foreign languages. Warner paid $1.5 million Read More ›
Is “Kipling’s World” a Key, a Mystery, or Both?
Readers have often wondered what Walter Hooper’s motivation is, and of course no one knows. But C. S. Lewis gave us a possible insight to that mystery in his little-known 1948 essay “Kipling’s World,” in Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). There Lewis analyzed his ambivalent response to Kipling: strong admiration and strong recoil. “To belong, to be Read More ›
Robertson Davies
According to Books & Culture, celebrated Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who died at 82 on 2 December 1995, had many careers: “as the last of the Oxford aesthetes, as a stagemanager at London’s Old Vic theatre, as the newspaper columnist who created and popularized the curmudgeonly Canadian commentator ‘Samuel Marchbanks,’ as a hopeful young playwright, as a disappointed middle-aged playwright Read More ›
Analysing for Authorship with the Cusum Technique
Andrew Morton, widely regarded as the world authority on authorship attribution, developed the cusum (or QSUM) technique in 1988 after 40 years of research. His method identifies authorship irrespective of genre, over long periods of time, and from an early age. Since 1990 it has been accepted in law courts as a sound identifier of disputed utterance, and has been Read More ›
From Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), 188-189. Aldous Huxley was the grandson of the great T.H. Huxley, the supporter of Darwin who became Wells’s instructor late in life. He achieved at least three reputations, as a cynic in the day of the Bright Young Things, as a mystical philosopher, and, after his death, as a Read More ›
C. S. Lewis on “Christian Reunion”
A passage from the essay “Christian Reunion” appeared as “Quotation of the Month” in the January 1996 issue of CSL: Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, edited by James Como. The May-June issue features James Tetreault’s article about Peter Milward’s 1995 book A Challenge to C. S. Lewis. Tetreault, a long-time member of the New York Society, Read More ›