Posted on 12/20/2010 6:57:54 PM PST by roses of sharon
Since Katie Couric first asked the question a couple of years back, journalists continue to pepper Sarah Palin with that classic ice-breaker: "So, what are you reading?" The subject came up again in a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine, and last week Barbara Walters returned to the question in interviewing Mrs. Palin as one of her "10 most fascinating people of 2010."
In both interviews Mrs. Palin cited C.S. Lewis as a favorite author she looks to for inspiration. This prompted talk-show host and comedienne Joy Behar of "The View" to deride Mrs. Palin and her choice of reading, asking: "Aren't those children's books?"
Lewis would likely have appreciated making Mrs. Palin's reading list. But he probably would have appreciated the questions about it even more. For Lewis, one of the best ways to know a person was to know what they read. He was convinced that books defined us and shaped our character.
***
Mrs. Palin is on the right track by giving C.S. Lewis a prominent place on her reading list. Yet Ms. Behar and other Palin critics have dismissed Lewis's work, forgetting that Lewis was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics. Ms. Behar's dismissal of children's books as less than important makes her a modern-day Eustace, the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons.
Lewis thought quite the opposite. He thought that fairy tales were the best way to convey truth for children and adults alike. He wrote about this quite often in his letters, and took no shame in reading fairy tales out loud in British pubs with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What’s on Behar’s reading list?
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.”
—C. S. Lewis
OK, it’s Hollywood and it’s just a movie but I enjoyed Shadowlands a lot. :p
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Shadowlands_%28film%29
I'll wager Whoopie Goldberg's Big Book of Manners.
That’s up next on my netflix queue
I have that on VHS, DVD...I’ve watched it a gazillion times and he and the boy, at the end, make me cry GOBS...every time! It’s a box of hankies movie!
Marx, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Guevera, Chomsky
mine, too.
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
- C. S. Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, 1930
my favorite C.S.Lewis quote
Best movie Debra Winger ever made.
I propose that any post mentioning Boy Jehar be labeled with a 50-Gallon-Drum-Barf-Alert!
“Mere Christianity” is the book that led Chuck Colson to Christ.
Behar might enjoy the The Screwtape Letters. At least she could relate.
In their attempts to mock Sarah Palin, they mock themselves and are completely unaware of their lunacy.
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