it's a good thing I like to dance
Apparently he’s not one. Have a listen:
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Favorite quote from the above audio: “Heaven is important but it’s not the end of the world.”
(audio excerpted from Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Podcast)
From an article in Touchstone Journal. Read the whole thing here.
“I owe Lewis a great debt. In my late teens and early twenties I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and read some of his paperbacks and essays several times over. There are sentences, and some whole passages, I know pretty much by heart.”
I owe a great debt to Lewis as well. Someone recently asked me to recommend some good fiction books for their 14-year-old son to read. I tried to think of some but realized that at 14 I was reading theology (an odd child, I know) and a prominent landmark in my reading was Mere Christianity. I still have the copy I read at 14 somewhere, a cheap paperback that blew my mind. I think there is more underlined than not underlined, and there are comments in the margins and dogeared pages - all the marks of a well-loved book.
“One of the puzzles, indeed, is the way in which Lewis has been lionized by Evangelicals when he clearly didn’t believe in several classic Evangelical shibboleths. He was wary of penal substitution, not bothered by infallibility or inerrancy, and decidedly dodgy on justification by faith.”
This has been a great puzzle to me through the years as well as I explored the entrance gates of both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Many of my Evangelical brethren are so wary of Roman Catholicism and yet they quote both Lewis and Chesterton without hesitation. Why? If these men were mired in error and heresy – as they accuse rank and file Catholics to be – then why should their words be any more quotable than Ghandi’s or Mother Teresa’s?
A couple more good quotes:
“There’s a good reason why we allow Lewis to lead us on. There is a real, not a pretend, humility about his “only-a-simple-layman” stance. For some of the time, as I shall suggest, he is a professional pretending to be an amateur; for much of the time, he’s a gifted amateur putting some of the professionals to shame; sometimes he’s an amateur straightforwardly getting things wrong.”
“If you don’t put Jesus in his proper context, you will inevitably put him in a different one, where he, his message, and his achievement will be considerably distorted.”
Read the whole thing here.
All salient points. He understands the medium. Take a look:
NT Wright on Blogging/Social Media from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.
Wright’s one big worry: isolationism. Sure it is human beings typing and human beings responding, but there is something about human communication that involves bodies and faces, and however good you are as a writer, you can’t engage in all those ways. We are in danger of dehumanizing our communication.
I like that he uses the terms “gnostic dream”and “cultural masturbation” to describe the sort of self-stimulation that seems so prevalent in in the (bad neologism alert) “blogosphere”. There is nothing more bland in the blog world than the comments section a blog with an exceedingly narrow audience.
Wright’s General Rule of Blogging:
For every hour you spend on a blog, you ought to spend at least that amount of time with real, touchable, hug-able human beings.
Amen.
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