Hard Times

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Charles Dickens

"Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of of any service to them" ---from "The One Thing Needful", Chapter One, "Hard Times"

Reading this book for the first time, I found Charles Dickens 1853 novel "Hard Times" about a fictional northern English city of Coketown and its and its sterile and dark atmosphere an excellent read. It starts with a indictment of factory-based, facts-oriernted "model schools" for children. Then we meet the "Hands" workers with little life beyond work, and beauty and social amusement seen as a frivious luxury (Charity or justice is also frivilous to this doctrine of top-down industrial feudalism. ) And then we see the effect the doctrine has on the very people who promoted it. It is not a cheerful picture.

Dickens' indictment of misapplied utilitarianism,the factory-school system that existed to root out the hearts of the young and the hypocrisy that some of upper class and wealth, especially the loathsome "self-made man" Josiah Bounderby, try to foist on their factory "hands". The book succeeds as an entertainment with all the plot twists and come'upance you'd want from such a book. But also as a political novel in the same vein as John Steinbeck's humanistic "Grapes of Wrath" or his earlier novel about struggling workers in Depression-era California, "In Dubious Battle".

Mainly this is because it is not a political novel in the sense of a polemic, but one that serves as a dramatized plea for the better senses of human beings to be restored and put above base coinage, banks, and economic productivity. It does this by giving us characters and humor and changed minds of peole we can care about, not just straw characters and statistics.

And it speaks to our time as well, a plea to save human beings from the maw of simply being industrial (or, in our day) technological or retail/service industry cogs and tools to any of the masters of our community. There's a little Coketown wherever you go.

Humans need circuses in some form, time for drama and poetry and beauty and time to appreciate it all. We all have a divine spark that should be cherished. Those sparks shouldn't be starved of energy.

Below is an animated adaptation of the first part of the novel, from a graphic novel by Nick Ellis.

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Karen Armstrong

"Centuries of institutional, political, and intellectual development have tended to obscure the importance of compassion in religion. All too often the religion that dominates the public discourse seems to express an institutional egotism: my faith is better than yours! As Zhuangzi noted, once people interject themselves into their beliefs, they can become quarrelsome, officious, or even unkind. Compassion is not a popular virtue, because it demands laying aside of the ego that we identify with our deepest self: so people often prefer being right to being compassionate."

Karen Armstrong is a well-known popular historian who has written a couple dozen books on religious matters. She herself is not affiliated with any one spiritual faith, but began her adult life as a nun in a convent in England from 1962 to 1969. (A time she recalls in her memoir, "The Spiral Staircase"). She found out she was more motivated to be a scholar then to be in holy orders and so she left the convent to devote herself full-time to her studies. She had a career as a writer and a television host where she explored religious and political events in the Middle East and modern Europe. She initial books were more negative toward religion and spirituality, but her current life has led her to work for international entities that try to bring people of different faiths to conferences and other projects to achieve greater understanding.

This book goes through a period that philosopher Karl Jaspers called The Axial Age, a period modernists date from roughly 900 to 200 BCE. It was in this span of time that the foundation of four great religious, social and political traditions developed that is the bedrock of much of the major cultures of the globe: Greek rationalism, Jewish monotheism, Indian religion and philosophy, and the development of the Confusion and Taoist traditions that helped united China from a group of warring states to an single unified empire.

Armstrong focuses on a great span of history and to try and cover all points of development would be a small book in itself. Suffice to say it is a great "refresher course" in ancient history. It highlights the rise (and fall) of Representative government in 5th Century Athens; the struggles and eventual loss of the Jewish independence to a variety of greta empires, the most traumatic of which was the 60-70 year Babylonian exile; the development of the Vedic religion in Indian history that , after urbanization, led to a movement away from blood rituals and into groups of "renounce-rs" and monks t leaving these environments toward an inner-self (Atman) and to a strong effort at tranquility of the soul, symbolized by Gautama (The Buddha) approaches toward an inner tranquility beyond all suffering and life vicissitudes to something called "nirvana" where ego is gone and the spirit is at rest from the struggles of rebirths and suffering. She also traces the rise of Sages like Confucius, a 6th Century sage who sought to create inner peace within society itself through a search for something called "ren", a transcendent and sacred reality that could only be achieved by discipline and renouncement of self.

Many others spiritual paths are discussed in being the historical background. Some are directed toward a universal love and acceptance of others without any recourse to a God or gods. Others paved the way for a greater emphasis on monotheism. Schools of divinity and skepticism, or idealism and idealism competed for adherents in places like the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

This western tradition of philosophic friction had to give way with the rise of institutionalized Christian power from Rome and Byzantium. But after rediscovery of Greek traditions (much of which came from Islamic scholarship during the later Crusades, ironically) in the 12th Century the ancient learning in astronomy and physics and engineering eventually became the catalyst for the scientific movements that led to the Second Axial Age of Newton, Freud, Darwin and Einstein.

Not all religious movements were involved in imposing a faith on others---the Buddhism of the 2nd Century Emperor Ashoka of India and the early Islamic Empire are examples of a power without cohering of spirituality. It is this freedom that I believe is the greatest gift of the Axial Age-the freedom to choose from all the great sages of the past and draw what is unique and similar to find a greater inner peace and hopefully a better external life.

George Harrison--"What is Life?"

From the 1970 album, "All Things Must Pass". This is my favorite of George Harrison's hit singles. It peak at Number Ten on the Billboard Top 100 list in Feburary of 1971.

This most spiritual of The Beatles proves here he can do a catchy little pop tune with the best of them I think .

I think the videoographer did a good job here with the images--although a few more from the post-Beatles period of a more mature Harrison would have been nice.

"Ave mundi spes Maria"/ from "Chant" (1994) /Bendictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Solis

from the spiritsite website on the Gregorian Chant featured here:
www.spiritsite.com

"The Monks of St. Domingo De Silos sprung onto the music scene with some very, very old tunes in 1994. By 1995, their album Chant had sold over 5 million copies.

"The album, and its follow-ups, are unadulterated Gregorian chant -- simple religious compositions dating back to the 11th century.

"As Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "The no-frills recording of Spanish monks captures with perfect clarity the intensity and intimacy of this form of prayer. Modest, unison singing--no tricks, no virtuosity--the chanting comes from the heart, unself-conscious and nakedly direct..."

"The monks of St. Domingo De Silos, apparently overwhelmed by the unexpected success of their music, requested that journalists leave them alone. Alas, this was a difficult proposal. The monks eventually acquiesced to the will of the people and released several popular follow-up albums."


Ave mundi spes Maria - English

Hail, hope of the world, Mary, hail, meek one, hail, loving one, hail, full of grace
Hail O singular virgin, who wast chosen to not suffer flames through brambles
Hail, beautiful rose, hail, staff of Jesse:
Whose fruit loosened the chains of our weeping
Hail whose womb bore a son against the law of death
Hail, O one lacking comparison, still tearfully renewing joy for the world
Hail, lamp of virgins, through whom the heavenly light shone on these whom shadow holds.
Hail, O virgin from whom a thing of heaven wished to be born, and from whose milk feed.
Hail, gem of the lamps of heaven
Hail, sanctuary of the Holy Ghost
O, how wonderful, and how praiseworthy is this virginity!
In whom, made through the spirit, the paraclete, shone fruitfulness.
O how holy, how serene, how kind, how pleasant the virgin is believed to be!
Through whom slavery is finished, a place of heaven is opened, and liberty is returned.
O, lily of chastity, pray to thy son, who is the salvation of the humble:
Lest we through our fault, in the tearful judgment suffer punishment.
But may she, by her holy prayer, purifying from the dregs of sin, place us in a home of light
Amen let every man say.

The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, by Martin Scorsese

Here's the surprisingly intimate scene between Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) and Jesus Christ(Willem DeFoe) from the film based on the 1961 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Both book and later film stirred up a storm of controversy. Scorsese's work was protested vehemently by some Catholic groups and a number of evangelical Christian organizations ,such as James Dodson's far-far right "Focus on the Family". The protests and the anonymous threats against those involved with the film put a decided chill on Hollywood making anything in a the way of a challenging religious film for some time.

You will notice Jesus remarks, which are consistent with the gospel accounts, make no political claim whatsoever. Pilate gets Jesus' worldview wrong--sees him as a politician, a dubious designation then and now-- and then the Roman realizes how truly revolutionary this little colonial trouble-maker really is.
They are two men are at complete odds in values from one another.

Traditionally after this encounter, Jesus will be whipped, then mocked by occupying Roman soldiers as "King of the Jews". The Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Catholic Gary Wills in his book "What Jesus Meant" (2006) points out something ironic and telling about the brutal and shameless mock-coronation that the gospel accounts report Jesus was given by the soldiers and future events :

"the clothing of Jesus in spurious emblems of temporal authority, has been repeated down through the centuries by people claiming to be Christ's followers... Christian emperors did it,both in the East and the West. The Popes did it. The divine -right kings. Now some evangelical Christians do it. All have dressed Jesus in borrowed political robes. They will not listen to the gospels, where Jesus clearly says that his reign is not in the present order of things. The political power they claim to exercise in his name is a parody...like the mock robe and crown put on him by the Roman soldiers. These purported worshipers of Jesus are doing the work of Pontius Pilate. Jesus, born on the run from power, is still hunted by it."

"The Language of God"

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science
Author:	Francis Collins

"The Language of God" is a 2007 book that makes a compelling case for a person in the higher echelons of the hard sciences having faith in God, as well as respecting the theory of evolution that agnostics Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley proposed in the 1860's.


To many Evolution as a theory is an attack on religion; to Dr. Collins more supple mind it is "the language of God". Collins, one of the scientific leaders of the Human Genome Project, also skewers the counter-arguments of the Young Earth Creationists takes a strong case for what he calls "Theistic Evolution"--a system that might be described as "intelligent design" for grown ups..

The book also suggests a truce over the pointless and seemingly endless debate in America over science and faith. As he writes in his summary chapter, "Biologos":

"Will we turn our backs on science because it is perceived as a threat to God, abandoning all of the promise of advancing our understanding of nature and applying the alleviation of suffering and the betterment of mankind? Alternatively, will we turn our backs on faith, concluding that science has rendered the spiritual life no longer necessary, and that traditional religious symbols can now be replaced by the engraving of the double helix on our altars?

"Both of these choices are profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind...And both are unnessesary. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in a cathedral or in a laboratory."

And he offers strong rebuttal to the smug atheism of "The God Delusion" author Richard Dawkins. This book might not make a believer out of you, but it will give you enough information about all sides of the argument and I think you can't help coming away from even a cursory reading believing that faith is God is not the "woo-woo" wishful thinking some pundits would like many to imagine.

Collins draws a lot of his faith from his personal experiences as a medical doctor. He does not come from a Christian background, so he doesn't write this just because he is trying to straddle some family obligations; he gained his faith in his twenties working with patients as a medical doctor, especially those dealing with death. He found that many of them had a sense of calm and poise that surprised him. One day an older lady facing the end asked him, "Do you believe in God." Collins, then an atheist, suddenly realized that his mind was in flux on the important matter.

After much soul-searching, he decided to do unusual for him up to that point. He visited a church. A pastor he talked to about his gnawing doubts about his original view of the Cosmos recommended he read C.S. Lewis "Mere Christianity". The results of his study of Lewis' book and The Bible opened new avenues of looking at the laws of the universe for Dr. Collins.

Here's an interview with Collins, taken from a video produced by the Faraday Institute at St Edmunds College, Cambridge.

Charter for Compassion--Bridging the World Religions and Practicing The Golden Rule

This video features an organization devoted to an alternative to fundamentalist violence and intolerance in the Middle East, Africa, North America and other parts of the globe.

The short film leads off with someone I think is one of the foremost popular spiritual writers of today, Dr. Karen Armstrong, author of "A History of God", "The Spiral Staircase" and, most recently "Buddha".

http://charterforcompassion.com/

The Central Asia Institute: Fighting Terrorists Without Bombs and Guns

"When it is dark, you can see the stars."--

Persian Proverb

 The Central Asia Institute  is a non-profit, non-governmental organization.  It was  started by Greg Mortenson, a one-time child of Christian missionary parents (sent to Tanzania for much of his youth).  He later enlisted in the military and became a medic, and later a trauma nurse by profession and a skilled mountain climber.  He was trying to climb the infamous "K2" mountain in the Himalayas when disaster struck his party about 800 meters from the summit.  He barely made it down the mountain alive and was nursed back to help by Muslim villagers in an isolated mountain town.

Thanks to the generosity of these strangers, Mortenson made a vow: he would return to the village and build the people there a school for their children.   The efforts to get funding for the endeavor (and the beginnings of the Central Asia Institute's main efforts to promote female literacy in Pakistan and later Afghanistan) were outlined in a July 2008 column by   Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (excerpt below) 

  "Scrounging the money was a nightmare — his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw — and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.

"To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local “buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact.

"Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan’s wild Waziristan region. It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

"Still, he notes that the Taliban recruits the poor and illiterate, and he also argues that when women are educated they are more likely to restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls.

"So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would probably be more resistant to extremism.

“Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country,” says Mr. Mortenson, who is an Army veteran.

"Each Tomahawk missile that the United States fires in Afghanistan costs at least $500,000. That’s enough for local aid groups to build more than 20 schools, and in the long run those schools probably do more to destroy the Taliban."

 

   Mr Mortgenson's is also the  co-author of a bestselling book about his experiences called "Three Cups of Tea" which has been on the best-seller lists in the USA for 90 weeks, despite not having a major publisher initially to promote it.  It was mainly by word of mouth. It was through my wife that I first heard of this amazing organization and these efforts to help children, particularly in promoting education for girls in isolated mountain villages around the old Northwest Frontier of Central Asia.  His organization also promotes the training of teachers from within the local communities themselves. www.threecupsoftea.com

(above) Here a camera crew visits a school and interviews Farhat, an eighth-level scholarship student, at a village school in the Pakistani part of Kashmir.  

 

  One of the mottos of the organization is "educate girls and save the world".  It is estimated by the Council on Foreign Relations that this is a key to break the cycle of poverty that afflicts this area, the overwhelming number of whose victims are women.  

For more on Greg Mortenson and the work of CAI, here is a clip from an interview from Borders Books television:  

A Gandhi Tribute--The Man and the Movie

M.K. Gandhi was, of course, one of the most amazing figures of the 20th Century. He believed in a God of Truth and in his autobiography "My Experiments With Truth" (1927), Gandhi admitted to making a "Himalayan" number of mistakes in seeking this Truth. The time he spent in prison for his acts of civil disobedience in South Africa formed the core of his later attempts to end British Rule in India and gain respect for all peoples of the world no matter what their station.

The clips in this film are from the early part of the movie. At this time in South Africa, Gandhi is a young lawyer representing the cause of migrant workers from India in the British colony. At this time (the 1890's) all over the English-speaking and European-dominated world, it was taken for granted that whites were superior. His own native India had a caste system
and he was born into the higher echelons of it. He "fought" not only against Western dominance but against the reactionary and violent forces of his own people.

Like his contemporary and political opposite, Winston Churchill, he lost his father early in life and made a name for himself in South Africa. (Churchill as an escaped POW in the Boer War; Gandhi in a campaign against unjust laws.) Gandhi had earlier gone to London to finish his studies to become a barrister. He had tried to "go native" while there, dressing in formal clothes and eating meat. He was once mocked by English passers-by on a street in London for wearing a tuxedo on an ordinary day when he first arrived. Later, in South Africa, he was thrown off a train for being a man of color in a whites-only compartment. He was later whipped and beaten and imprisoned in the cause of equal rights.

It was in prison that he read Leo Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You" and the American author Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience". These writings, the basic tenets of the Common Law, the sacred writings of the Baghagvad-Gita and his own experiences sent him on a course to end segregation without violent uprisings but with what the Indians call "ahisma", a non-violent course of action. He led marches, boycotts in paying The Salt Tax and wearing textiles made in Britain, and personally and most famously threatened to end his own life through starvation to bring peace to his native land--a peace for Hindus, Muslims, Christians, for all people.

These are two clips from the early part of Lord Richard Attenborough's 1982 film, "Gandhi". The selections here contain what I think are some of the most interesting chapters of the entire film. M.K. Gandhi is not a "Mahatma" during this period. He is just a young lawyer but, like all great personages, he is not to be assuaged.

The Problem of Pain

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	C.S. Lewis 1940, Reprinted 2001

Seeing the human follies of war, greed and over exploitation of finite global resources, one book has been on my mind lately. I ask your indulgence to revise a review I wrote for "The Problem of Pain" last year on "Yahoo 360" now that its contents--edited a bit--seem more relevant. Lewis, better known as the creator of "The Narnia Chronicles", was a superb and concise prose writer, and a true "apostle to the skeptics" and this is one of his best works.

Critics of Christianity have had their field days going off on how a loving Deity could create a world where such things as pain and suffering exist. " The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike," Jesus pointed out, but what of the people who suffer from pain for no good reason such as genetic illness or being in the pathway of an evil person who wanted to rob or hurt someone?

There is also the question of hell. (Or Hell, don't know if I should capitalize the first letter of that place or not.) Some leaders in the church don't accept the idea that there is a place like hell. Given the popular conceptions of "everlasting fire" and what Dante's first volume of "The Divine Comedy " did for fleshing out the images he associated with the Underworld, and the graphic torments his enemies suffered, I can hardly blame any cleric for not playing that up at the Sunday Morning sermon.

Other Christians fully embrace the concept of Hell, but feel the place will be reserved for folks whose political and social mores do not match their own. Some are so certain about it they put bumper stickers on their vehicles saying "Eternal Life: Smoking or Non-Smoking" or "Those Who Live Like There's No Hell Better Be Right". That seems too smug to me--are such people casually condemning others to the "outer darkness" just because they are riding their car's bumper? The smuggest bumper sticker I've seen is the one that says "In Case of The Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied". Hmmm. Are these people talking to the Angels or do they think their presumed high status within a particular church congregation will give them a "All-Access" ticket if the world comes to an end?

To me, it's one thing to have faith, "the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). It's quite another to figure you got a pass, or , even if you are somehow certain of it, that you should brag about it. Christianity has its many critics and some of them are so because we forget that pride of place is something Jesus refused to give even to his own disciples, as the special request of the brothers James and John to Jesus illustrates (Mark 10:35-40).

One of the best and most direct discussions of why injustice and pain exists in the world came from the great lay Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, in the book "The Problem of Pain" (1940, reprinted 2001 by Harper Collins Books). It is only one of many books about Faith that Professor Lewis wrote about, and it is to me the most challenging.




"On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. On the other hand, if God's moral judgment differs from ours so that our `black' may be His `white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good".

--C S Lewis, from "The Problem of Pain"

Christianity presumes a loving Creator-God. To Lewis, such a God must be willing to grant humans free will. This is fraught with the potential for great love and great abuse. Lewis takes Augustine's notion of the Fall of Man seriously, but he puts it in a context that includes an Evolutionary path. (Lewis is no fundamentalist, although many of that ilk might like to pretend so because of his popularity from The Narnia Chronicles.)

Our "primitive" ancestors may have been less "brutish" than we imagine. Some of them might have been nobler than most of the people walking around today, Lewis surmises. But at some point thousands of years back a few humans--perhaps in an early town-dwelling period--began to set aside honoring God and preferred instead to have their own personal stash of good things that belonged not to a Creator but to themselves. This is The Fall to Lewis, and whether it involved a piece of fruit from a Tree of Knowledge or just something that rightfully belonged to another person or tribe of people is of no matter. Mankind had fallen. The endless repetition of this thievery on through today, for ill-gotten gain large and small, is just a reenactment of what some Christians see as Original Sin.

Not all pain comes from our neighbors. Pain also exists because of nature. The victims of myriad natural disasters for instance. If God intervened and provide miracle upon miracle to avert any human pain, it might be more pleasant but it would not be Life as we know it. He could also intervene constantly to stop the mistakes and follies of humankind that also result in mass pain. But would that be Life either? And is the hand of God in the present and the past staying disasters from nature or human judgement that we do not realize through our senses? This is the core matter of "theodicy" ("Why God allows evil.") It is the dark glass St. Paul said we are forced for now to see through.

Lewis goes on here to explain that the "good" most mortals understand is not so much completely different from that of Our Creator; we understand good, but our actions are often simply not "good" enough. We override our consciences to get what we want, even if the action is plain selfish and we rationalize the wrong somehow.

What we might accept as simply an expedient act, "getting some of our own back" from someone, is plain bad. That people will often look back and regret an action that hurt others shows that our concept of "good" is within us.

Our understanding can be insufficient in the way, the author points out, that a child's first attempts to draw a circle or a wheel on a piece of paper is not very close at all to a wheel as adults could fashion.

It's that humans often only want "kindness" from God, not love. ("Many want a grandfather in Heaven, not a Father" he writes. "Someone who doesn't care what is happening on Earth as long as 'a good time is being had by all'." ) There are consequences for our bad choices.

In this world, or course, a loving parent cannot always be "kind" to a child, for instance. There has to be times of discipline with the fun and indulgence. It's not because the parent doesn't love the child but because the parent is not indifferent to the future development of said child. There is no hint in his writing that restraint and discipline should take the form of corporal punishment, either. That presumably is left to the parent.

The need for hell, as mentioned by Jesus among others in the Gospels, of course has to be addressed. To Lewis, the netherworld is there to punish those people who have chosen to live lives devoted to self. It is not because God has ceased to Love an unrepentant criminal or a immoral person; it is because greedy and violent people must see how far they have fallen from grace. "To forgive is not the same thing as to condone," he writes.

Punishment exists both here and beyond. And shame and guilt are not always something to be expunged by a psychiatrist or a regimen of pills, but can be a chance for one being to feel the pain one has caused another and repent. It is this pain (which Lewis calls "God's megaphone") that sane people experience for past wrong actions.

Before I leave this off I want to make something clear: Mr. Lewis nowhere says that all human suffering is somehow just or delivered from God. All those who suffer from persecution in places like Darfur are, in my mind, suffering the way innocent early Christians suffered and I believe Lewis would acknowledge this. But it is POSSIBLE that some bouts of suffering can have a restorative effect on an individual.

Many people do not come to God until they feel a malady or suffer a personal reverse. When the illness lifts, however, they can be the better for having gone through a bleak period. And it is indeed a loving God who will wait patiently, as he did in my personal life, for some sadness or pain to crop up before I would deign to-- finally!-- acknowledge His gifts to me.

If you'd like to get Professor Lewis' ideas from "the horse's mouth" (and I can do little justice to his reflections here) then picking up a copy of "The Problem of Pain" is a good place to start. (All Lewis major works have been recently reissued.) I don't think one needs to be a committed Christian to gain something from this writings. You will likely come away with a clearer understanding of spiritual matters, and where that takes you might be a pleasant surprise as it was for this blogger.





See link below for more on C.S. Lewis and this book:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html