More Prayers Please

Under a lot of pressure right now, friends-- and not the fun kind. A lot of it of my own making, too. I appreciate all your prayers in the past and I would be grateful of any going now. Be assured I keep you in my prayers, too. Thank you.

This was Too Good to Last

I've been feeling nostalgic about the comic-buying days of my childhood and early teens recently. Every Thursday, I would buy Eagle comic (war and science-fiction and fantasy) and The Transformers (Optimus Prime and company). I would buy them while out shopping with my mother and I would actually read them while walking around the supermarket.

I very vaguely remember Scream!, a British comic devoted to horror which ran for only fifteen issues in 1984. Then it ceased publication, and was absorbed by The Eagle. Nobody knows why it was cancelled, though some think it might have been just too gruesome for kids-- there was quite a lot of controversy about it, and this was the era of the "video nasty" panic and of Mary Whitehouse.

Now, I am a belated admirer of Mary Whitehouse, who I think must have been very courageous and who was pilloried by the liberal intelligentsia and "alternative" (i.e., unfunny) comedians-- a good enough reason to admire anybody, methinks. (Readers from America and elsewhere might not know who she was-- she was a crusading housewife who led a campaign to "clean up television" in the eighties.) I've even flicked through her autobiography.

But I do think it's a pity Scream! fell victim to this reaction. (If it did, that is; it might simply have not sold very well. There is a lot of speculation on the internet on this subject, which makes me wonder why nobody ever just asked the publishers. Come on, it was 1984, not 1884). I think the ghoulishness of horror-- vampires and skeletons and ghosts and zombies all the rest-- are an entirely healthy and natural part of childhood, and not at all of the same order as graphic violence or explicit sex or drug references.

Like the lady on the billboard in Philip Larkin's wonderful poem "Sunny Prestatyn", Scream! was too good for this life.

But fear not, you can read the whole thing on this website, for free! I just read a few stories and they were pretty good-- but only if you can remember what it was like to be thirteen (and I pity you if you can't).

(So why should readers of a blog by an Irish Catholic layman be expected to be interested in a British horror comic from 1984? Oh, well. I just go for it at this stage-- I'm often surprised by what does interest people who come to this blog.)

Lines Written in Frustration

Curses on him who delays a reply to an urgent email
Make his hair all fall out (make her hairy all over, if female);
Let him in nightmares be chased by some villain straight out of a crime mag
While every one of his steps is slowed with a five second timelag;
And may the worst day of his life, this scrofulous scoundrel who ducks such an onus,
Pass by with a glacial—a ghastly—- a geological slowness.

The Intellect and Christian Evangelization

Dr William Lane Craig, the prominent American philosopher of religion, explains the importance of the one to the other.

It's interesting that at one point he says that evangelization in Europe is "immeasurably" more difficult than in America, as Europe has become so hostile to the gospel. He should know, as he spent thirteen years in Europe and spoke in many universities here.

I think the importance of this subject simply cannot be exaggerated. Christianity is essentially an evangelistic religion; but now more than ever, in Europe especially, evangelism is imperative.

And an intellectual basis for Christianity is essential for evangelization, since appeals to emotion, aesthetics, social cohesion, self-fulfilment, or nostalgia simply isn't going to cut it. (Of course, there is a place for all those things, as well. If God made man to find his ultimate happiness in Himself, than it stands to reason that religion would "tick all our boxes", so to speak. But they need to be accompanied by some intellectual rigour.)

Dr. Craig is an appealingly avuncular figure, and I especially like the cosy sweater he is wearing in this video. The Chrismas tree lights in the background add to this sense of cosiness.

Is C.S. Lewis Better than Chesterton?

I was watching a video of a lecture given by the Church of England apologist Alister McGrath to promote his new biography of C.S. Lewis. Towards the end of the video, McGrath answers a question from an audience member about the comparison between Chesterton and Lewis.

I found myself quite surprised and indignant at his response (it can be found about fifty minutes and thirty seconds into the video):

Lewis frequently emphasized how much he owed to G.K. Chesterton, especially his book The Everlasting Man. And, indeed, I would personally say that I’m sure Chesterton’s apologetic writings were a inspiration to Lewis. The real danger, I think, is, if you’ve read Lewis and then read G.K. Chesterton’s book, for example Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man, you kind of feel you’re turning to something that’s not quite as good, and the real problem is that Chesterton actually is very good, it’s just that Lewis is better [audience laughs], and so that inevitably, in a way, we’ve kind of devalued Chesterton as a result, but Chesterton was very important for Lewis.

I find it hard to believe anyone would come to this conclusion. I love Lewis, and I love Chesterton, but Chesterton seems to me to be easily the more important talent and the deeper thinker of the two. For one thing, Chesterton defended and proclaimed Christianity on so many more fronts than Lewis did. Lewis made several important philosophical arguments, including the argument from reason-- that is, that a thoroughgoing naturalism can't explain how the conclusions of rational thought can be defended in the first place, since rational thought must simply a physical process like everything else. (The argument was not original to Lewis, nor did he pretend that it was. Chesterton had made the same argument himself, though he never developed it as fully.) Lewis also made important arguments from the field of textual analysis, which was his expertise. I myself am very struck by his argument that the gospels simply don't read like myth or legend-- that the Evangelists seem to have pre-empted novelistic writing by many centuries, with their use of incidental detail and matter-of-fact reportage.

But Chesterton did so much more. Chesterton's defence of Christianity takes in literary criticism, social comment, history, folklore, humour, politics, sociology, mythology, psychology, and pretty much every other field you can think of. He was so much more prolific than Lewis, writing his weekly Illustrated London News column alone for forty years, and even when he was not explicitly writing about religion, the link between his spiritual beliefs and any given argument he is making is always fairly obvious. Chesterton well and truly defended his claim that "nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true".

Also, though Lewis could certainly be funny, Chesterton is much funnier.

It is true that Lewis was the more careful and analytical writer, and that his clinical prose can sometimes make Chesterton seem (by comparison) sloppy and slapdash. That is a point in his favour. But if Chesterton was sometimes careless, it was because he could afford to be. He was simply brimming over with ideas, inspiration and insight. In depth and breadth and brilliance, I think he outshines Lewis as the sun outshines the moon. Probably Lewis would have agreed.

P.S. Twice today, while reading about C.S. Lewis on the internet, I've come across the claim that Lewis became an atheist as a result of the carnage he witnessed in World War One. One of these claims was during this teaser trailer for a planned film about Lewis's conversion. (Unfortunately, the website to which the trailer directs the viewer is now "suspended". But there was a real studio behind the venture, since there are several articles about the project on the internet. I hope the idea hasn't been scrapped.)

But I wonder how they could make such a mistake? Lewis, of course, was an atheist before World War One, and also after it. He lost his faith in his teens and didn't regain it until he was thirty-two.

A Gable Wall

Nothing is more beautiful than a gable wall.
For all the whirling splendour of a waterfall
Or a kaleidoscope, or dust motes dancing in air,
There is a splendour, too, in the sublimely bare;
The chastely, simply, humbly, gloriously bare.

What lies behind a gable wall? Life lies behind;
Life happening over and over and over, time out of mind;
Too many tales for the telling, in kitchen and bedroom and hall.
Oh somehow, I cannot say how, I hear life's jubilant call
Never more clearly than when I look at a gable wall.

Another Wonderful Video by Father Robert Barron

Here, he discusses how modern culture finds it hard to "hear" the Catholic Church because modern culture has discarded the idea of formal and final causes.

Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but I think there are an awful lot of bad Catholic apologetics and bad Catholic commentary out there. Walk into Veritas books in Abbey Street and take any book from the shelf; most likely even a glance at the blurb will tell you that it's full of platitudes.

Father Barron is one of those commentators who avoids platitudes, and who strikes at the heart of a topic. Here, he addresses an important philosophical question that has profound implications on how Catholics (and their secular critics) view such matters as sex, the family, freedom, and human life-- and a lot more besides.