{"id":11527,"date":"2018-12-06T11:10:15","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T16:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=11527"},"modified":"2018-12-06T11:10:15","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T16:10:15","slug":"new-letter-from-c-s-lewis-reveals-intolerance-of-unexamined-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=11527","title":{"rendered":"New Letter from C.S. Lewis Reveals Intolerance of Unexamined Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We know C. S. Lewis wrote a <a href=\"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?tag=letters-of-c-s-lewis\">lot of correspondence<\/a>\u00a0to readers, strangers, children, and women&#8217;s study groups. To that last group, a previously unpublished letter offers an example of one of things that could set the author off.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Dear Ladies,&#8221; Lewis wrote, &#8220;Who told you that Christians must not go to the theatre, dance, play cards, drink, or smoke?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Who these ladies were is unknown and they apparently annoyed Lewis with their letter, but he wouldn&#8217;t ignore it. He responded to it with a duty few of us share today.<\/p>\n<p>Stephanie Derrick, author of\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/2QAlcz8\">The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist\u2019s Reception in Britain and America<\/a>, <\/em>explains some of what we do about this letter and <a href=\"https:\/\/world.wng.org\/content\/dear_ladies\">our favorite Oxford don&#8217;s habits of correspondence.<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>First, it appears they parroted some tired, theologically unsound notions about Christian behavior\u2014i.e., good Christians don\u2019t drink, smoke, or otherwise enjoy themselves\u2014and if Lewis had intolerance for anything it was the touting of unexamined tenets. This was partly a matter of personality\u2014Lewis once described himself as \u201cby temperament, an extreme anarchist\u201d\u2014but it was also an effect of his training in logic and philosophy. And he was particularly irked by the addition of perfunctory requirements to the Christian faith, once saying, for example, \u201cHow little I approve of compulsion in religion may be gauged from a recent letter of mine to the Spectator protesting against the intolerable tyranny of compulsory church parades for the Home Guard.\u201d Lewis hated to see the joy of hope and faith\u2014or of everyday living, for that matter\u2014diminished by dogmas that were shaped more by social convention than sound religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We know C. S. Lewis wrote a lot of correspondence\u00a0to readers, strangers, children, and women&#8217;s study groups. To that last group, a previously unpublished letter offers an example of one of things that could set the author off. &#8220;Dear Ladies,&#8221; Lewis wrote, &#8220;Who told you that Christians must not go to the theatre, dance, play &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=11527\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">New Letter from C.S. Lewis Reveals Intolerance of Unexamined Convention<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[432,1649],"class_list":["post-11527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-letters-of-c-s-lewis"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}