House of Lewis wins House Competition!

Through hard work, perseverance, and skill, the House of C.S. Lewis won the 2008-2009 House competition.  Each of nine houses competes through various athletic, academic, and artistic activities during the school year.  Lewis attained an early lead by winning both the Great Race and the Drama competition during the first semester.  After placing sixth and third, respectively, in the GPA and Basketball competitions, the lead was slightly lower.  We regained it after placing third in the City Engagement competitions.  During a very close Interregnum competition, where the House of Regan placed first, with Lewis fifth, we ended up winning by a scant five points!  [Congratulations to the House of Regan, who placed second and had a fantastic year!]

More importantly than winning the House Competition, though, the House is pleased to have had such incredible growth as brothers in Christ this year.  Through an early focus on fellowship, we were able to bring the House of a level of discipleship in which we met regularly and prayed for one another.  Several small groups formed, as well, that met weekly for Bible study.  This type of growth exemplifies the House system’s ideal form–and the House competition victory was simply an extra fruit of the hard work of every man of Lewis.

The House of C.S. Lewis is also pleased to announce it’s leadership team for the 2009-2010 year:

• President – Kyle McCracken
• Helmsman – Alexander Bouffard
• Scholar – Matt Rosenbaum
• Chamberlain – Spencer Imbrock

Lewis places third in City Engagement!

This year, The House of C.S. Lewis decided to focus on the idea of stewardship and biblical financial planning.  It is our belief that Christians ought to know how to manage their money well.  If this happens, then they will be able to better provide for their families, to more properly support the church, and to help alleviate problems (like poverty and hunger) in the world.

Moreover, in this time of economic crisis, it is more necessary than ever for everyone to know that money is a gift from God and should be handled as such.

The first part of City Engagement is to do a small project in New York City.  We partnered with several churches on Manhattan (and one on Long Island) and invited participants to a seminar on Biblical Financial Planning, led by Robert Ross, CFP.  Almost 20 people attended and learned a theology of money, as well as practical tools for money management.

The second part of the project is to develop a business plan in which we scale our project to a higher level.  We developed an organization that would work nationwide to sponsor financial planning seminars in churches.  This non-profit organization would run with a small staff to coordinate efforts through a $1.5 million budget, and it would put on 600 events each year.

A copy of the business plan is available to anyone interested (e-mail houseofcslewis[at]gmail.com).

Reflecting on Beauty

I don’t know what it is about this line in chapter 2, but I keep coming back to it.  Orual speaking of her new sister, Istra (Psyche, in Greek), who is the most beautiful baby on whom Orual has ever laid eyes and who is growing into a beautiful woman:

It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it.

I am struck on several levels.

First, Lewis wrote this line about returning to and reflecting on beauty.  I keep returning to it and reflecting on it myself.  Literary genius?  I think so.

Second, that Orual would say this intrigues me.  So many times, she seems to be lamenting her ugliness and bordering on bitterness for the curse of the gods.  But she can still recognize beauty and appreciate it.  The Fox would say that Psyche’s beauty is as nature would all have women be, if some chance had not ruined it for them.

What is beauty?  For Psyche, it is the source of her intrigue, the reason why a god would want to have her.  But it is also her downfall, as I recall.  Philosophers from Plato and Aristotle on have struggled with this question of the tangibility (or intangibility) of beauty.  It can be an asset, and it can be a weapon.  It is also an excellent tool for reflection; I find beauty in literary passages, colorful sunsets, and the towering heights of the city, among other things.  Where do others find beauty, and how do they reflect on it?

Welcome to the new website for the House of Lewis

This website is still under construction as we import everything from our old website and continue to add content from recent years.  Until it is up and running, feel free to poke around the pages above.

We will also be importing the Blog-Through-Till-We-Have-Faces started during Winter Break.

Some More Introductory Character Development: The Fox

The Fox reminds me of Aristotle. He is inquisitive and bright-faced, and he seeks to learn everything about Glome—right down to the land’s flora and fauna. Aristotle, likewise, was a master of plants and animals and cataloged them his whole academic life.

Two of the Fox’s first lines, pithy little sayings he uses to cheer himself, are the following:

No Man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

And

Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.

Now, I don’t remember the exact wording Aristotle uses, but he makes a point similar to the latter saying by explaining that there is a life which men should pursue because it is a truly human life, the only one worth living. Since we are different from animals in that we have reason, the life worth living must be a life devoted somehow to an intellectual development. As an educator, the Fox surely had this in mind for his educational charges, Orual and Redival.

He set about teaching philosophy, reading, and writing—though he would occasionally recite a line of poetry to Orual, who relished these moments. Often, the poetry would be followed by the line, “All folly, child.” The Fox was certainly attentive to reality, and tried to pry Orual away from all things mythical, poetic, and musical, except to sate her curiosity every so often. He wanted her to learn the “real” stuff of education.

As we’ll see later, however, this dis-emphasis on myth and deity might not be correct.

All is not folly.

-Chris

An Opening Thought

In the opening paragraphs of Till We Have Faces, Orual, the narrator of the story, gives us her reasons for writing the tome. She burns with complaints against the gods of her land, and since her life is nearly over and her family secure, she feels she can finally voice these complaints. She writes her story, she says, “as if I were making my complaint of [the god on the Grey Mountain] before a judge.” She starts from the beginning and lays out the case against the local deity, for reasons we will presently see.

Orual refrains from writing in her native tongue, however. She had been taught Greek from a young age, so she writes the story in the hopes that a Greek speaker will bring her story to that land of free speech in the future.

Perhaps the wise men will know whether my complaint is right or whether the god could have defended himself if he had made an answer.

As we read through this novel, my personal favorite of Lewis’, let us keep this plea in mind. The above quote is one of the opening lines of the novel, and it seems as if Lewis is asking us to do the same.

Is Orual justified in her anger? Have the gods wronged her family? Is she overreacting? Why is she so angry? What is the significance of the veil, of the idea of faces?

These are questions astute readers will ask. I have not read this in several years, so I will be dusting out the cobwebs, as well. I hope we can read this together and come to some intellectual stimulation and growth in the end.

Onward and upward!
-Chris

Evil & the Problem of the Fractured Body

The problem of evil is a problem. Anyone who doubts this should consider the wrenchingly haunting protests of Fyodor Dostoevesky’s Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. Reading it again today, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. He accepts as just the sufferings of “grown-up people,” for they have eaten of the apple and have the knowledge of good and evil. And of course there’s the promise that the wrongs will be righted, that the lion will lie down with the lamb, that there will be no more tears or pain. But, Ivan protests, “If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it…?”

He shares a couple ghastly stories to bolster his point. There’s the Turkish soldiers throwing babies up in the air and catching the baby on the bayonet–all in front of the mother. Or the five year old child whose parents beat her for no reason, smearing her face and filling her mouth with excrement, and leaving her alone in the night to her groanings and misery. How does the meaningless suffering of even just that one child justify the creation of a world where sin abounds?

Listen to Ivan’s protest: “Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs him so much?” And, “It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for…if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

Ivan accepts God. He accepts that God could have created the world, given us free will, and allowed suffering and evil as a necessary condition for free will to truly exist. But it’s too high a price, he insists. “And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket…It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

Those are haunting images accompanied with a haunting conclusion: most respectfully return Him the ticket. His protest demands the Christian’s full engagement. But here is the curious and perplexing further problem: just where the Christian is confronted with so massive a problem, the Christian community has at least two responses with different premises. I am, of course, thinking of the Calvinists and the non-Calvinists response to Ivan. Thus, the problem of evil is compounded by the Christian community’s own unique problem: just where a unified, coherent response is most needed, it has church divisions; just where the church should be a witness to God’s shalom, it demonstrates conflict.

Whatever the case, the piquancy of Ivan’s protest shows why the debate between Calvinists and non-Calvinists (what exactly are we to call them?) is so often heated and contentious. The beauty and truth of our Christian witness is at stake. Dostoevesky’s response to Ivan’s protest is not an intellectual argument (as important as that is), but the incarnational, Christ-like living of Father Zossima and Alyosha. And this is why the real problem right now may well be the problem of the fractured Body.

- Posted by David Lapp