Posts Tagged C.S. Lewis

General Introduction
- Spring Breaked, Spring Breaking, Will Spring Break
- No listener feedback

The Old 100^th
- Which tune?
- A happy coincidence
- Defining our terms
- Words to frame God’s glory
- Biblical doxologies

Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow
- A broadening experience
- Our international outreach
- Our own relationships
- Three poles

Praise Him, All Creatures Here Below
- Is this project a form of praise?
- Nathan gets postmodern
- Geist and human consciousness
- A verbal act of resistance
- The God of the dilettantes

Praise Him Above, Ye Heavenly Hosts
- The Sacred Academe
- Our influences
- Getting universalist
- The monastic order of rhetoricians
- Baptizing the imagination

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
- Nathan talks about the Trinity
- Functions of the scriptural narratives
- Apophatic tap-dancing

Amen
- Let it be so
- A type of submission through assent
- More linguistics
- Praise as a method among methods
- A bout of sincerity
- Specificity is the soul of praise

General Introduction
- Disappointing David Grubbs
- Listener feedback
- Stroking and broking the ego
- (Yeah, my math is off)
- A correction
- Theologico et Ratio

Translations
- Old Lady Sayers
- End notes, not footnotes
- Reproducing rhyme and meter
- Ciardi’s middle ground
- Musa, king of Dante
- Wikipedia as savior
- The advantages of reading in translation

Footnotes
- C.S. Lewis gets snobby
- Thundercats and Plutarch
- Spreading our ignorance

Poet and Persona
- It gets better
- Guelphs and Gibilines
- Who is Beatrice?
- How much biography is necessary?
- The pleasures of rereading

Poet as Synthesizer
- Dante’s debt to the Nicomachean Ethics
- How approachable is Aristotle?
- The Philosopher says these things
- Looking up the footnotes
- Nathan’s favorite Thomist
- Social virtue

Medieval Cosmology
- David lectures
- What Lewis says
- Hierarchies and boundaries

Virgil
- The Guide
- Soul-sorting in The Aeneid
- Violating the social contract
- Dante’s poetic furniture
- How good is The Aeneid?
- David defends Orlando Furioso

Mythological Sources
- The absence of Homer
- The venerable Edith Hamilton

Later Dantes
- Hart Crane goes underground
- Cheever’s suburban inferno
- The Burial of the Dead
- O’Connor’s Purgatory
- Who hears Prufrock’s story?

Our Advice
- Read the other two!
- Don’t try to understand every reference
- Train yourself
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. New York: Hackett, 1999.

Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Crane, Hart. The Bridge. New York: Liveright, 1992.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: NAL, 2003.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandlebaum. New York: Bantam, 1982. 3 volumes.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3 volumes.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1955. 3 volumes.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: Norton, 2000.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Back Bay, 1998.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

—. The Great Divorce. New York: HarperOne, 2009.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2010.

General Introduction
- Dr. Gilmour!!!
- We kid because we envy
- Listener feedback
- The delay in show notes
- What’s on the blog?

What Is Epistemology?
- It’s all indirectly Greek to me
- Mise en abyme
- Connection to metaphysics
- Epistemology junkies
- Invoking epistemology to affirm or deny metaphysics

Ancient Epistemology
- Forms and objects in Plato
- Another remove
- Innate knowledge
- Aristotelian observation
- Telos and the individual object
- Thomist epistemology and Thomist metaphysics
- The necessity of divine illumination

Descartes’ Epistemological Turn
- Hidey hidey hidey ho
- Doubt everything
- Je pense donc je suis!
- Augustinian influence
- Descartes’ unsatisfactory solution
- The Cartesian Reese’s cup
- The difficulty of refuting rationalists

The Rise of Empiricism
- Building ideas
- Nathan’s favorite skeptical atheist
- The elimination of causality
- Today’s inconsistent empiricists
- The cult of the scientist

Kant! Kant! Kant!
- The best(?) of both worlds
- Kant is hard
- Noumena and phenomena
- A priori categories
- On hating Kant more than you love Jesus
- Kant’s relationship to Hume

Post-Kantian Epistemology
- Analytic and continental
- Logical positivism and its heirs
- Hegel’s ghosts and organs
- Thomas Kuhn and the historical scientific question
- The epistemological humility of the Emergent Church
- Pragmatism

What Difference Does It Make?
- The message we must spread
- Breaking apart from the age
- Correcting the mistakes of others
- Avoiding the whig view of history

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952.

Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Dover, 2003.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of History. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: And Other Writings. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Jones, Tony. The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement. Minneapolis: JoPa, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Paul Guyver and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. James W. Ellington. New York: Hackett, 2002.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew. New York: Hackett, 1991.

Lewis. C.S. “On the Reading of Old Books.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Peirce, C.S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1867-1893. Ed. Christian J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Trans. Adam Beresford. New York: Penguin, 2006.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981.

• Nathan Gilmour is only familiar with two of Alex Preston’s top ten literary believers.  How many do you know?
• C.S. Lewis the lover of old books
• Thomas Frank (whom Gilmour likes and about whom Grubbs is not at all thrilled) on the Resurgence of the Right
• David Brooks on why every good radical should be a traditionalist
• The intellectual community as the core purpose of a college
• 

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 January 2012 (First Sunday after Christmas, Year B)

Isaiah 61:10-62:3  • Psalm 148  • Galatians 4:4-7  • Luke 2:22-40

When people tell their own stories, we always do so in relationship to models: we can depart from them or model our own on them, but we’re always in relationship.  When conservative Christians tell our stories of faith, our models, whether we’ve read the originals or not, tend to follow the patterns of Augustine or of C.S. Lewis.  (The latter, of course, largely patterns his own story after the former’s, but that’s just another exhibit that supports my claim.)  And the two of those, as anyone who has read them knows, tell their own stories in decidedly Pauline tones.  The story is not an unfamiliar one: for intellectual reasons or for want of purpose in life, the young person rejects the faith, coming at a vital point in life to the realization (it need not always involve a miraculous light that knocks one off of one’s steed) that the Christian faith is the true way, and after that dramatic moment of turning, life does not proceed without difficulty but always has a sense of purpose.

Paul’s, of course, is not the only story that the New Testament presents: if we look for stories to which we can relate, there’s Peter’s tale of rash promise, failed promise, and restored promise.  There’s Cornelius, the one who sought truth and found his reward when the faith he seeks transforms before him.  There are the sons of Zebedee, the masses at Jerusalem, Barnabas, and Apollos.  And in this week’s reading, there’s Simeon, the man who spends his whole life waiting for something, something that certainly, in his advanced age, he had an idea of, yet something which surprises him when the Spirit leads him to enter the temple.

Simeon sings the joy of one who has heard the voice of the Spirit for a long time but who has only in the moment discovered the form of the Spirit’s movement in the world: although he has no sense of Cross or Resurrection, Simeon knows that, by some means, this will be the one who brings to fulfillment the grand promises that God made to Abraham in the earliest days of Israel’s story, the one who will teach all the nations the way of the LORD and who will bring those who elevate themselves crashing down.  Because the Spirit leads him, he knows what he sees, even if his sight only sees what happens on the far side of Jesus’s dark demise.

Simeon also sees that this child will be a revealer, one who discloses the secrets of people’s hearts.  No longer, when the salvation that Simeon sings comes to completion, will the hypocrisy that characterizes power at all levels stand in the world.  No longer will those who lord it over others be able to call themselves benefactors without their true intentions coming to the light.  No longer will those who use the name of God as a cynical strategy for control be able to keep the light from shining.

When the prophetess Anna begins to tell everyone about the child at the end of this passage, many years and many mysteries lie between Israel and the salvation of the Resurrection, but the word has come.  Many folks I’ve talked to have lived the same story: surrounded by the culture of Midwestern or Southern Protestantism, nonetheless they can name a day when God showed up, perhaps not revealing all that lay before them, the crosses and the sorrows and the friends’ deaths that would mark their stories, but certainly knowing that salvation had become present.  For those who can remember such a day, just as much as for those who can remember a road to Damascus, the salvation of Jesus the Messiah has come, and in this season of Christmastide, such is great and good news.

May our stories be stories of deliverance, and may our prayers be prayers for the Kingdom.

In the anthology of C.S. Lewis’s writings published with the title God in the Dock, we find this interesting tidbit, which may be something of an answer to my speculative question toward the end of the episode. During an open forum at the “Head Office of Electric and Musical Industries Ltd.” (wouldn’t you love to work there?), everyone’s favorite Oxford-don-who-isn’t-Tolkien fielded this question: “Is attendance at a place of worship or membership with a Christian community necessary to a Christian way of life?” His answer:

That’s a question which I cannot answer. My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that meant being a target. It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early for Church. It doesn’t matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to Church it’s very selfish of you and you upset the house. If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to Church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit. It is not for me to lay down laws, as I am only a layman, and I don’t know much. (“Answers to Questions on Christianity,” 61-2)

General Introduction
-  What’s wrong with the blog?
-  Our shame in the face of The Pietist Schoolman
-  The perils of Internet celebrity
-  Working on our Night Cheese

The History of the Book
-  Should you buy it?
-  What Nathan argues
-  How it got published

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
-  Nested and side narratives
-  Who’s responsible for the Fall?
-  Feminism under the radar
-  Lanyer’s (lack of) influence

The Sequel to Paradise Lost
-  The Temple of Doom?
-  A series of stern lectures
-  Milton vs. Nicene Trinitarian Orthodoxy
-  The creeds and the Scriptures

Theological Dramatics
-  A quick correction
-  The believing writer and the dramatic text
-  The writer within the Body of Christ

Other Sources
-  “The Dream of the Rood”
-  Active martyrdom
-  The lessons of “The Pearl”
-  The heretical Christ stories of recent centuries
-  Taking stock of Dante

The Theologian and the Literary Critic
-  Where do they intersect?
-  The riddle of Stanley Fish
-  Theological implications of literary criticism
-  Can this work outside of New Historicism?
-  The critical mirror

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

“The Dream of the Rood.” The First Poems in English. Ed. Michael Alexander. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge: Belknap, 2003.

—. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

—. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Gilmour, Nathan. Theological Dramatics: Two Christological Case Studies. Lambert, 2011.

Lanyer, Aemelia. The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Harper, 2009.

Mailer, Norman. The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1999.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2009.

Pullman, Philip. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011.

Saramago, José. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Mariner, 1994.

We hope you enjoy our fight in the final segment!

General Introduction
- Nathan Gilmour does it all
- Where’s Grubbsy this week?
- Is there a difference between Iowa and Ohio?
- Listener feedback

Nationalism, Tribalism, and the Ancient World
- The Roman origin of the word tribe
- Cities and states
- Multiple identities
- Ancient Empires and national borders
- Statehood in ancient Northern Europe
- To what extent do we identify ourselves with regions?

Hebrew Nationalism
- And its influence on later civilizations
- Land, seed, and blessing
- Migrations to various Promised Lands

Jesus Throws Everything Off Balance
- With whom do Christians identify?
- Jesus’ early audience
- Where’s our citizenship? Who’s our Savior?

Grubbs Goes Medieval
- The city of God and the city of man
- Church and state
- The first martyr of the British Isles
- Ethnogenesis and mythology
- Those Manichaean Plantagenets!
- Elizabeth and James tie it together
- The Nationalist Imagination

Entering the Modern World
- Church and king as tired and out-of-date
- Enlightenment nation-building
- The rise of intense national identity
- Personal identity and place of birth
- Nationalism or ideology?
- Is patriotism nationalism?
- Religious privatization
- Atomic bombs, crossbows, and swords
- Did the Archimedean Death Ray exist?

American Nationalism After 9/11
- David educates us all on flag etiquette
- American vulnerability
- Our shock that someone doesn’t envy us
- Liberal vs. conservative reactions
- How honest should the president be?

The Tea Party and the Future of Nationalism
- The conservative cannibalization of George W. Bush
- A center-free party
- A new kind of populism
- Is there a leftist nationalism?
- Nathan and Michial come out against Big Business; David chuckles
- Fragmentation, not polarization
- Wonks and single-issue voters

A Very Long Takeaway
- Do Mormons believe the Constitution is inerrant?
- We fight about the Constitution
- (Listen closely to hear Michial’s cat, Dottie. We’re not sure whom she’s agreeing with.)
- And then we finally get to the point

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time. New York: T&T Clark, 2003.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960.

Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Trans. Thomas J. Dunlap. Berkeley, Cali.: U of California P, 1990.

YouTube Playlist of St. Matthew’s Passion

Translation of the Libretto

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- Yet more on Church Music
- Take that, rival podcast!

Defining and Destroying Our Terms
- David gets pedantic (GASP!)
- Why’s the chronology so wacky?
- The Neo-Classical Revival
- The Western tradition connection
- Cultural prestige marker
- What is Greek and Roman music?
- Classical as a golden age
- Replicability
- Classical as one-half of the classical-pop dichotomy
- Types of “classical” music

The Sacred/Secular Distinction
- How appropriate is it?
- Christendom throws a wrench in the works
- Bach’s coffee cantata

Bach and The Passion of St. Matthew
- Splitting the service
- Historical facticity
- The harpsichord and the pianoforte
- Complexity and counterpoint
- Music and performance
- Rock-star musicians and rock-star composers
- The composer biopic
- Participation and understanding

Who Owns Bach?
- Can you divorce “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” from its religious content?
- Chopin, Debussy and Beethoven in church services
- Reading Dante for the mythic structure
- David gets controversial (Internet atheists may direct their responses to him)
- Schleiermacher’s whitewashing of religious difference
- What does sublime mean, anyhow?
- Bach’s religion and his music
- Hindu spirituality and American excess

Educational Rants
- Getting rid of arts education
- What good is classical music?
- Stretching students
- Holistic education
- A new approach to the crucifixion
- Bach as a steadying force
- Making children perform
- Disciplining our desires
- Classical music education

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldwaith. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2004.

L’Engle, Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. San Francisco: Harper, 1972.

Lewis, C.S. Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Longinus. On Great Writing (On the Sublime). New York: Hackett, 1991.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Albert A. Anderson. Millis, Mass.: Agora, 2009.

General Introduction
- Where’s Michial teach again?
- Stuck in the middle with the soulless Calvinists
- The plan for November

Talking Back, Not Bach
- One hand in the hornet’s nest
- Forgive us, please
- David and Michial hate each other

What Is Emotion, Anyway?
- Good feelings and a warm heart
- The Presence of God^TM
- Biological emotion
- Talkin’ bipolar
- That’s when it hit me: That luv is a verb!
- Emotion as orientation of affection

Calvinism and Emotions
- Why are we so suspicious?
- Calvinist intellectualism
- St. Augustine’s distrust of emotions
- Where the big T fits in
- A New Kind of Schleiermacherian Emotionalism
- Engaging emotion with the Pietists
- Head knowledge and heart knowledge
- Let’s talk Being instead of heart
- Where the Neo-Orthodox get it right
- On desire, in German
- The Calvinist worship service and the redirection of affection
- But who are we to judge?
- And here come the negative emotions!

Emotion in the Psalms
- Psalm 22 and Christ on the cross
- Moving from lowliness to glory
- How much did Christ have in mind?
- How “As the Deer” got it wrong
- The Psalm of Asaph
- From emotion to understanding to emotion

Jesus Is My Boyfriend
- The strange sexual hang-ups of “In the Secret”
- Ah, but we digress: the Song of Solomon
- Parental advisory

Public and Private Worship
- Jesus is my personal boyfriend (in the Middle Ages, anyway)
- Feelin’ Icky (The Book of Margery Kempe Song)
- Are Americans uncomfortable with corporate worship?
- Leaving on the emotion
- Is a Manwich a meal or an hors d’oeuvre?

Closing Thoughts
- Yeah…we don’t like music
- We’re not terribly cuddly
- Eeyore and Tigger
- Worship beyond music
- Waiting for the end of the prayer

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1995.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Ed. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Wetmore, Robert D. Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be: 15 Biblical Principles for Knowing and Loving God. Camp Hill, Penn.: Christian Publications, 2003.