George Orwell both liked and disliked C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In his 1945 review printed in Manchester Evening News, Orwell outlined the plot and mad scheme of the enemy, saying it was not “outrageously improbable.”
Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)
And one other thought:
Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”
More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”
Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”
From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.