Oaxaca, Mexico–It is a distortion of politics that establishes separate categories for domestic and international affairs. In fact, the categories repeatedly merge. A good example is the current economic plight of Mexico and, concurrently, the legislation before Congress to restrict illegal and legal immigration. The interaction is profound. Mexico, like the United States and Canada (and several other countries, for Read More ›
The Temptations of Evolutionary EthicsPaul Lawrence FarberBerkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, 210 pp. The Secret Chain: Evolution and EthicsMichael BradieNew York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 198 pp. The ethical implications of evolution are receiving a remarkable amount of attention today, despite the death sentence that was pronounced on it by “nurture” enthusiasts in the Read More ›
T.H. Huxley’s Ambivalence Sherrie L. Lyons, “Thomas Huxley: Fossils, Persistence, and the Argument from Design,” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (1993): pp. 545-569. Sherrie L. Lyons, “The Origins of T.H. Huxley’s Saltationism: History in Darwin’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1995): pp. 463-494. Since completing her doctorate on T.H. Huxley with historian Robert Richards at Read More ›
In C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, released by Harper Collins in the fall of 1996, Walter Hooper abruptly reverses his claim that Lewis’s Grief Observed is fiction. (See pp. 194-201.) Without any explanation, he includes Grief in his autobiography section and vouches for its historical accuracy. Until now Hooper has always insisted that Grief is strictly imaginative and that Read More ›
Jane Langton is the successful author of a dozen breezy detective novels featuring an American academic named Homer Kelly. She illustrates them with her excellent drawings. The Dante Game (1991) tells about a new American School for Florentine Studies, where Kelly is teaching Dante. “Boston’s detective-turned-Harvard-professor is hard at work in Dante’s divine but deadly Florence.” Langton quotes frequently from Read More ›
In C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, careful readers find a few surprising inclusions and omissions. For example, Hooper tells about the Miramar Hotel in Boomemouth where the Tolkiens stayed on vacations, and lists it in his index -although it has nothing to do with Lewis. He gives an entire paragraph to the life of Fritz Gasch who married Lewis’s illustrator Read More ›
6. Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). Essays on literature and education. Long unavailable except from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. In Xerographic edition. Contents:”Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” ‘William Morris.” “The Idea of an ‘English School,”‘ “Our English Syllabus,” “High and Low Brows,” “The Alliterative Metre,” “Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare,” “Variations In Shakespeare and Others.” Read More ›
Gordon Monson, The Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1992 Psychiatrists say compulsive liars one researcher estimates they account for up to 5% of the population suffer from a personality disorder that leads them not just to tell lies but to try to live those lies as well. “A lot of these people try to rewrite their personal history,” says Bryan Read More ›
Walter Hooper’s 1991 essay “C.S. Lewis: The Man and His Thought” is largely a collection of Hooper’s anecdotes old and new. “…I became ‘The Soldier Who Had Heard from C.S. Lewis’ ….” After ringing the doorbell of the Kilns, “My heart was beating so hard I had to lean against the wall.” “It was this joke [concerning Lewis’s bathroom], as Read More ›
More on Lewis on Dante On 22 November 1931 C.S. Lewis wrote to Warren: “Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Hardie (another English don] comes and reads Dante with me, and every second Monday when the college literary society meets.” (Lewis also expressed his opinion of writers like Dante: “To read histories of literature, one would Read More ›