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The Lewis Legacy-Issue 81, Summer 1999 Stop and Shop

Books by Legacy Readers Nancy-Lou Patterson’s new fantasy for young adults, The Tramp Room, tells of a young girl falling asleep in the Joseph Schneider Haus today and awakening there in the 1850s. She experiences life in that Mennonite community, learning about the simplicity, hard work, and artistry of that culture. Trade paperback edition from Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Waterloo, Read More ›

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 Read More ›

Kathryn Lindskoog’s Informal Answer to the Ninth Non-Proof

IN MARCH 1999 Ed Brown announced on MERELEWIS that he has put to rest the claim that Walter Hooper’s 1975 bonfire story is false. Ed is a good-hearted man who means well, but he has never read my two books and several articles about the subject and has no idea that his is the ninth bogus proof that has been Read More ›

C. S. Lewis and the Great American Hoax

THE QUESTION: Is It True? On 19 March 1963, C. S. Lewis wrote to an American lady: I am thrilled to hear that San Suez [her pet dog] has a sweater! Is this part of the demarche (it’s in all our papers) which a body of American women are making to the President [Kennedy] to get animals properly clothed “in Read More ›

A 1998 Exchange in the American Spectator, and a Legacy Response

Dear Sirs, With regard to Tom Bethell’s article “Controversy in Shadowlands” in your September, 1998 issue, I am disheartened to see an otherwise fine magazine engaging in needless controversy. The much-ballyhooed charge that Walter Hooper forged The Dark Tower is so far from reality as to defy belief, and one wonders why it is still being repeated. Consider the following: Read More ›

Letters to Malcolm

The Wonders of International E-Mail On 26 April, Bill Fong, the son of immigrant parents from China, sent Kathryn Lindskoog an e-mail from Sacramento, CA, introducing himself and asking, among other things, if Lewis had been translated into Chinese. Fong, who had once been a classics major and studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, said he was no longer fluent in Read More ›

A Happy 1974 Visit with Len and Mollie Miller (1974 photo)

In July 1974 Clyde Kilby introduced Wheaton College alumna Faith Sand to his friends Leonard and Maud Miller at their new home in Eynsham, Oxfordshire. (The couple had lived with Warren Lewis in the Kilns until he died in 1973; then he provided this new house for them.) The Millers died before 1980, and Clyde Kilby died in 1986. By Read More ›

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White and black pieces on chess board

Zero-Sum Folly, From Kyoto to Kosovo

What do the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the global warming treaty in Kyoto, and the Social Security “crisis” of demand-side Keynesian economics have in common, apart from a convergence of K’s? You can even add Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Answer: They all reflect a belief in a zero-sum world. The concept of a zero-sum system originated in a branch of Read More ›

Haeckel’s Embryos

In The Origin of Species Charles Darwin wrote that “the embryos of mammals, birds, fishes, and reptiles [are] closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar.” He inferred that all vertebrates “are the modified descendants of some ancient progenitor,” and that “the embryonic or larval stages show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole Read More ›

A Species’ Fate, By the Numbers

Population viability analysis (PVA), a favorite approach of conservation biologists for predicting a population's survival, is coming under scrutiny now that its use in critical decisions on endangered species is on the rise. Increasingly, PVAs are being attacked as too simplistic, overly demanding of data, error-prone, and hard to verify. Last month, at the first-ever major conference on the technique, scientists discussed hurdles facing attempts to extend PVA to cover a wider range of species, and how to factor in the behavior of our own species. And one scientist described how he crash-tested PVA models in the lab, a practice that could help ecologists refine the technique. Read More ›