Southern Baptists, Disney, and C.S. Lewis
One reason I left the Southern Baptist church was that they seemed to do too many attention grabbing silly things. Good people overall, but as an organization I think they sometimes hurt the Kingdom more than help it. Just my opinion. Maybe in time I will have a better perception of them.
You may recall back in 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention started a boycott of the Walt Disney Company. After eight years, the boycott was lifted earlier this year.
I'm sure the timing couldn't be any better, as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will be opening in theaters later this week. Narnia was written by C.S. Lewis, considered one of the greatest Christian authors.
Here are some interesting tidbits I found about C.S. Lewis:
- He died on 11/22/1963. Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by the Kennedy assassination.
- JK Rowling has said that the name of Cedric Diggory (a character in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) is an homage to Digory Kirke (a character in Lewis's Narnia books, most especially The Magician's Nephew)
- Member of the Oxford literary circle the 'Inklings' along with writers J.R.R. Tolkien, Jeremy Dyson, Charles Williams, Messrs Coghill, and Owen Barfield.
- His speech patterns, and some aspects of his personalities, were the basis for the character of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- He based Ransom, the main character in two of the works in his Perlandra trilogy, after his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
12 Comments:
Do you know who else died on 11/22/1963? If C.S. Lewis represented the death of the most famous christian, and Kennedy the death of the most famous politician, this man represented the death of the most famous Athiest....
That would be Alsous Huxley. Not being very cultured, I have never heard of the guy. However, this book does sound interesting "This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley. In this philosophical work, the three men meet in a limbo before the afterlife, and debate the divinity of Jesus Christ, contrasting the differences in their personalities and world views"
And to think I was going to suggest just such a book.
I had no idea Aldous Huxley was an atheist. Brave New World is one of my favorite books; in fact, my church book group in Dallas read it, and no one mentioned he was an atheist. Wow.
and this is Geeding feeling even more uncultured.
Don't be silly! I read BNW my senior year of high school, but there are lots of books that practically every other high school student reads that I've never read. I want to see Pride and Prejudice, but I never read that book. No worries, mate.
To be more accurate Huxley was not an atheist. He is the man who invented the word agnostic,
meaning one who is "without knowledge." He believed that no one could know
if God existed, that if God did exist He had not revealed Himself to man.
In his mind, if God could not be known, then God was irrelevant. For Huxley
only the natural world was knowable. He was well known as a "inveterate hater of religion." And that is your littlepastor history lesson for the day.
BTW-I'm not trying to slam him, just stating this background. :)
i feel educated today. ;-)
another tidbit... i am pretty sure the ever popular Veggietales is now owned by Disney as well...
I laughed out loud after I read that one!
i really like this post since i love tolkien and lewis...great works;but dyson (the double)and barfield ( poetic diction: a study in meaning)are very good too). and the tidbit about harry potter's cedric diggory was great.
sistergeeding out!
Great post and great comments Baggy! Yeah, I know about the Southern Baptist stuff...now living in North Carolina, I cannot escape it!
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