rgorsch

Sorry, Michael Stuart Kelly, for mangling your moniker. To Adam: I think I have encountered that quotation about Lewis and partisanship before. Yes, I think it fits my impression of Lewis overall. He did not want to engage much in or be perceived to be engaging in partisan politics. But I do think conservatives perceived him as sympathetic, and he was very suspicious of statism and other threats to an old-fashioned ideal of liberty. Apropos of this, I think as a Christian he did not want to be perceived as and didn't identify himself as anything but just "a Christian," neither very low-church nor very high-church, to use the English terminology. Within the realm of Christianity, he didn't want to be or be perceived to be partisan. Hence, the idea of "mere Christianity." To Adam: Actually my Catholic college in California is not a rung of hell. "English" is a flourishing major these days, with plenty of Asian and Latino students eagerly studying British and American Literature. Go figure.

To Adam and Stuart and PDS: Yes, Lewis was a man to go out and smoke and drink with his pals at a pub. He was also a brilliant thinker and when he wrote about Christianity--my favorite books to cite are Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man--I had to say, well, I don't believe this stuff but I have got to respect the rationality of this guy. As it happens, Lewis and I share a profession. We have both been professors of English, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance British literature, for our entire careers. He wrote brilliant books about intellectual history from antiquity to the Renaissance and about literature in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. We also share an interest in science fiction. Lewis was one of the first--I think he was the first--British academic of note to write in defense of science fiction as a genre. Born a couple of generations after Lewis, I grew up a reader of science fiction, especially Andre Norton, Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, and a reader of Ayn Rand. And eventually I discovered C S. Lewis and became an English major most likely as part of the same general process. And here I am forty years later. I teach English at Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, near San Francisco. I hope others will be interested in discussing Rand's response to Lewis. Ironically, if I had been interested in sharing Lewis with Rand myself, I probably would have given her this book, hoping that she would respond to the ideas, fundamental to this book, that values are objective and that there is a natural law. Best, RG

"Not another fucking elf!" I believe that was uttered by one of the other Inklings present in the pub, and not by Lewis. My understanding is that someone definitely said it as Tolkien read or began to read. RG

As a lifelong reader of both Ayn Rand and C. S. Lewis, I think discussion of Rand's comments on Lewis would be a worthy topic. However, it would be a mistake to bill this as a clash between objectivism/libertarianism and conservative evangelical Protestantism. Lewis has been embraced by some American evangelicals, but he is by no means what such conservative Christians would like him to be. He is the rationalist, natural law-revering Christian that every nonbeliever should be able to respect. He also has libertarian political tendencies. Read The Abolition of Man above all, but also Mere Christianity. In addition, his science fiction trilogy starting with Out of the Silent Planet is terrific. Its final volume, That Hideous Strength, is a fabulous satire against state-sponsored science and state bureaucracy. As an atheistic objectivist, I love his work.

Thanks for all of the great information, everyone. Thanks especially to Jerry for tracing the complicated history of the cassette tape set that I have. Robert Gorsch

I have a 20 cassette tape version of Basic Principles of Objectivism. The publisher is LAISSEZ FAIRE AUDIO. There is no date to be seen anywhere. I bought it in the year 2000. Is this tape set the same as the one sold by Academic Associates in the late 60s/early 70s? Does anyone know? Does any one have a reliable date for the recordings sold by AA? I saw somewhere that the set was first published in 1969.