Your Opinion on the Plan for this Fall

Rev. Beckmann writes:

OK, folks. Your opinions have come in - mostly via e-mail - and they have all been in favour of the plan below. So, we will divide our next four meetings according to the four parts of Mere Christianity:

September: "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe",
October: "What Christians Believe",
November: "Christian Behaviour",
December: "Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity".

I'll be posting the exact dates here soon - in a week or so.

Will Vaus Interviewed on 100 Huntley Street

May 21, our friend Will Vaus, author of The Professor of Narnia, appeared on Canada TV, interviewed by Moira Brown. You can watch the video on YouTube.
FYI, homepage for the program: http://www.100huntley.com/index.php
Will Vaus' site can be found in our links.

N. T. Wright Reviews Planet Narnia

N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, has just written a review of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia. With permission, it appears below:

"Michael Ward's Planet Narnia is an example of a very rare species: a work of literary detection which, despite the breathtaking daring of its central thesis, is utterly convincing and compelling. Once you realise -- as most of Lewis's enthusiastic readers have not done -- the extent to which their hero was soaked in mediaeval cosmology, and saw some of its key elements as pointers to profound aspects of God-given reality, the pieces fall into place with the combined thrill of an aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual satisfaction. Ward anticipates and more than answers every possible objection to his stunning proposal. His detailed scholarship, down to the use of Lewis's underlining of particular passages in his own copies of obscure mediaeval poetry, reinforces the thesis at every point. Reading the Narnia books will, in the best sense, never be the same again -- not that anything will be lost, but that an entire new layer of understanding will be present, shedding a quiet but powerful light on each story and on the collection as a whole. It's rather like the moment when Albert Schweitzer explained to his French organ teacher what the Bach chorales were all about, by referring them back to the Lutheran hymns Bach had in mind, a whole world of which French Catholicism had been ignorant. Suddenly the music made a whole new sense, without losing anything of its previous beauty. What's more, Ward's own writing, though academically rigorous in expounding complex and sometimes abstract themes, is not without its own literary beauty, its own webs of allusion and echo, and its own spiritual challenge to the shrunken imagination, cosmology and theology of our own day. Lewis may count himself lucky that the person who would tumble to his long-buried secret was one whose own powers of understanding and expression would be equal to the task, not just of proposing it to a surprised public, but of exploring and explaining the theme in a manner worthy of its subject-matter."

Our last meeting for the season

Our last meeting of the Society for the '08-'09 season was this past Friday, 7:00-8:00 P.M. at Rock Point Books - 4th & Broad. The topic for our meeting was Lewis' book Reflections on the Psalms. D.V., we'll start back up in September. We should have our autumn, '09, agenda posted here by summer's end.

Narnia Code aired 16 April.

Michael Ward has discussed the Narnia Code in a forthcoming BBC documentary. It was be screened in the UK on Thursday 16 April at 10.35pm on BBC 1.
BBC program link here.

The Narnia Code

We have reported news that the material in Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia is being made into a movie. There's now a website about the video, with a link to Youtube so you can see a trailer. The website is: http://www.narniacode.com/ . We don't yet know when this will be available for the public, but we'll keep you posted.

Since it was published in 1418, The Imitation of Christ (De Imitatio Dei) by Thomas a'Kempis has been the most widely read book of Christian devotion, second only to the Bible in its use. After he returned to his Christian roots, C. S. Lewis read from this book every day.
As an attempt to better understand Lewis' spirituality, we are going to read this book and discuss it at our next meeting, 17 April, at Rock Point Books.
Many editions of this work are available. I recommend a more modern English translation. Rock Point had a nice one when we were last there. They can certainly order one for you. The cover seen here is of the Dover Publications edition, which is only about $2.50 and features the translation of Croft and Bolton.
Even if you are not able to read the book ahead of time, come anyway. You may learn of a book that you will want to make a part of your life in the years to come.

An analytical summary of The Problem of Pain, ch.'s 1-3

You can download the summary Rev. Beckmann composed of the first three chapters of The Problem of Pain by clicking here. It's a MS Word doc. Feel free to ask questions about it.