Marshall, P. Gilbert, L. Shea, N. Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians. Thomas Nelson. 2013.…
Lewis was a British writer who lived during the early 20th century. Lewis was originally an atheist who set out disprove Christianity. He quickly learned that Christianity and the story of Jesus were true, so he became a Christian author in order to spread the gospel of Jesus. Lewis was an extremely influential man; his articles had a massive impact worldwide. As previously stated, The Great Divorce is a tremendous rebuttal of the book, Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Throughout the book, Lewis makes it crystal clear that Heaven and Hell are not one and the same. Since the book is written in the form of a story, it is ideal for the less educated reader to understand and appreciate. Even though on a fundamental level it is a story, as the book is unwrapped and examined, many theological concepts are found. These abstruse concepts attract and sustain the attention of the well-educated reader. Lewis does a fantastic job at capturing the attention of a wide range of audiences. Another brilliant aspect of the book is Lewis’ word choice and use of imagery. Through entirety of the book, Lewis guides the reader on a journey of the landscape with the use of his words and imagery. Whether it be in the grey town, the entrance of heaven, or the ever-distant mountains, the reader can almost physically grasp the landscape detailed in the book, thanks to Lewis. One of the negative aspects of the book was the lack of theological originality. Lewis did not present any new theological concepts or even any new opinions on any theological concepts in the book. He only gathered information and put it into story form. Had he added some new ideas, it would have greatly increased the quality of the…
Born in 1808, England, Caroline Chisholm was christened and became part of the Church of England. She grew up on a farm and was the youngest of 16 siblings, from an early age Caroline was introduced to practices of humanity i.e. her father caring for a poor maimed soldier and he informed them of the man who fought for them (country, people, risking life). She was educated by a governess and encouraged to take part in local community discussions. Later on she met Archibald Chisholm, a Roman Catholic, 10 years her senior, he was a Scottish soldier in the East India Companies Army, and they then married in 1830. Caroline arrived in Australia in 1838 and was a devoted wife and mother of eight children, who helped to give dignity to women and families…
It is easy to see that C.S. Lewis intended his novel to be an allegory for Christianity, with his use of Aslan as a representation of Jesus and his example of the cross in the stone table. Lewis shows that one can create an entertaining, fun children’s story while also giving more experienced readers a deeper meaning to think about. His success teaches writers that they should not be afraid to engage in silly, fantastical subject matter even if their underlying theme is…
1. Were soldiers religious? What did they think about God? What sorts of religious viewpoints do we see in this book?…
When comparing such authors students can gain an in depth knowledge of that time as well as the overall state of Christianity and psychology in history. To end the class on Fear and Trembling a modern day comparison is drawn between the Knight of Faith in Kierkegaard’s book and the Knight of Faith in the 9/11 tragedy. The question is posed as to whether these terrorists were trying to grasp the finite and infinite at the same time during their suicide missions. If Abraham was willing to make a permanent sacrifice for his faith, were the terrorists doing the same for their faith? Making sense of a historical book in light of modern society is always a goal that should be emphasized in teaching and learning (Malesic,…
C. S. Lewis is a famous Christian author who uses the roles of good and evil to explain Christianity in his novel, The Screwtape Letters. Susan Black once said, “We’ve all got both light and dark inside of us. What matters is the part we choose to act on – that’s who we really are.” There is both good and evil in the world, and it is our personal choice as to which of these we choose. I believe that Lewis recognized this and purposely chose to write from Screwtape’s perspective.…
Though Screwtape’s distorted views on God’s love, Lewis implies that God is “Love” that He loves people for their sake, not His, and that His love challenges people to become generous in their love. Wormwood’s “patient” is drifting dangerously deeper into Christian belief, and Screwtape advises his protege to forsake fleshly temptations and try to corrupt his spirituality. He mentions that the various interpretations of Jesus that exist in society are devilish inventions. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each “historical Jesus” is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new “historical Jesus” therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another.…
After the Great War, the word was in disarray. Millions had died, and even more were wounded in some gruesome ways due to trench and chemical warfare. Many of the world’s economies were also suffering due to the depletion of resources from the war, and the reparations owed from the treaty. The Christian response to this, and other crises of the time, was quite interesting. While Henry Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” advocated less for doctrine and more towards a social gospel that Walter Rauschenbusch’s “Christianity and the Social Crisis” emphasized, Clarence MacArtney’s “Shall Unbelief Win” did not agree with Fosdick.…
Overall, this story represents many people in the world and gives the allusion that most Christian’s are good people, but proves that many have hidden curiosity about the things of the world, and how easily each can be seduced into a path of…
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996…
The Screwtape Letters is a satirical book written by C.S. Lewis with the intent to deliver practical lessons on a person’s daily exercise of his or her faith. The book’s overall theme is “God vs. the devil” or “good vs. evil” in the human experience. In the book, two devils – Screwtape, an elder tempter, and Screwtape’s novice nephew Wormwood -- are in a fight to claim as many souls, or ‘patients,’ as they are referred to in the book, and Screwtape advises Wormwood on the particulars of his job through a series of letters to his nephew, which are then “published” as this book. When Luke Johnson says in his essay “Powers and Principalities: The Devil is No Joke” “When Satan’s power is portrayed in terms of individual temptation and seduction rather than systemic evil and social oppression, when the cosmic battle between the angels of Michael and of Satan pictured by Revelation is reduced to “My guardian angel” and a nemesis imp competing for a moral victory…the way is cleared for devil jokes,” (Johnson 3) he captures what Lewis was trying to deliver…the simplistic and overlooked talents of the devil to win the hearts and minds of people. What will be examined today are the lessons presented by C.S. Lewis in the book The Screwtape Letters, the relevancy to Christian life, and the main point of the book in reference to theology.…
In the novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving uses the religious belief and spread of Christianity. The novel is based on two friends, John Wheelwright and Owen Meany, who live in a small town in New Hampshire. John goes on to say how he is a Christian because of Owen. From the beginning, Owen shows how passionate he is about his religion and his ability to inform others of Christianity. Owen says, “I am God’s instrument” (Ryan) and believes that he is doing work for God on Earth. Owen is a very strange kid and never really changes even when he grows up. He is described as a small kid, with big ears, a high-pitched nasally voice, incredibly smart, and not intimidated by anyone of any age. At the beginning…
Robert Penn Warren, in his novel All The King’s Men, examines the modern man’s quest to live a simple existence—a life, void of sin, in which man endeavors to discover truth. Jack Burden, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, is thrust onto the political scene when his managing editor instructs him to travel up to Mason City to “see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ” (51). The comparison between Willie Stark, the governor of Louisiana, and Jesus Christ emerges as an important association because, even though Jack knows of Willie’s corruption and sin, he reveres Willie as a father figure; Jack’s search for the truth, the identity of his father, is one of the main crises in the novel. While Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men is certainly a political commentary, religion plays an interesting role in the novel: Warren employs biblical and religious references to emphasize the convictions of certain characters and to explore the value of truth.…
Henry Graham Greene (1904-1991) is famous around the world as a prolific writer. During his career, extending over sixty years, he wrote more than twenty novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, screenplays as well as books of travel writing, essays and film criticisms. It’s not an easy matter to deal with such a milestone in English literature that came through so many different periods and matured so much over the time[1]. One aspect of his personality may help us as a red-line in our investigation: Graham Greene was a Catholic writer, or as he said, “a writer that happens to be Catholic”[2]. Indeed he is often compared to French Catholic novelists of the first half of the twentieth century such as Leon Bloy, François Mauriac and George Bernanos. According to Mark Bosco, Greene himself acknowledged that “there does exist a thread in my carpet constituted by Catholicism, but only one has to stand back in order to make it out” [3]. Bosco explains that if Catholicism is not the really fabric of many of his texts, it is actually a thread that helps to bid his literary preoccupations into a recognizable pattern. We’ll come to the conclusion that for Greene there can be no Catholic novels, but that faith helps to give individuality to the characters. We will focus on some of his so-called catholic novels as Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940). First, let us clarify in which soil did Greene’s faith grow and what’s his background?…