CS Lewis

At Oxford University's Practical Ethics blog ... C. S. Lewis as a moral philosopher. I'm not sure what to think of Lewis ... on the one hand, I liked his fiction books, I liked that he was friends with guys like Bede Griffiths, I liked his views about animals, and I liked the movie about him, but I don't like most of his theology, including his views on hell: "I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the gates of hell are locked on the inside." But anyway, here's the beginning of the Practical Ethics post ...

Tomorrow it is C.S. Lewis’s birthday. He’d have been 116. He died 51 years ago, his death pushed out of the headlines by the deaths of JFK and Aldous Huxley. He’s had far more influence than either.

He’s remembered mainly as a children’s writer (the most dogmatic atheists, terrified or disgusted by the roar of Aslan, nonetheless bring their children to stroke the lion’s mane), and as a Christian apologist. He, irony upon irony, a beer-quaffing, chain-smoking, divorcee-marrying intellectual, living and breathing high pagan culture along with his pipe-smoke, is the darling of American evangelicals. And that’s why he’s neglected by serious philosophers. It’s understandable. We tend to judge people by the company they keep. But in the case of Lewis it’s unfair .....