The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volumes 1-3 (Harper San Francisco, 2004, 2004, 2007)

Reviewed by Jessica Shaver Renshaw

“I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way)…”

– C.S. Lewis, age 17, to Arthur Greeves, March 14, 1916

I’ve wondered what C.S. Lewis was like as a person.  He was a colossus as thinker and author, able to sever knots of intellectual and theological difficulty (and stuffiness) with insightful words, offering truth in clear, sensible, emotionally satisfying chunks.

I’ve often thought he would have been an intimidating man to hang out with.  He and his wife Joy played Scrabble in five languages, including Chaucerian English.  Lewis kept up a correspondence with an Italian priest in Latin, the only language they had in common.  Of the hundreds of books in his library, a visitor could pick one at random, start to read aloud any sentence - and listen to Lewis quote the rest by memory.

I couldn’t possibly match the breadth of his literary allusions, his powers of articulation.  And then there’s his early snobbery, when he felt that Americans and women were inferior beings.  I am both.  He preferred the camaraderie of men, especially accompanied by a pint in a smoke-filled pub.  He would have awed me and I would have bored him.

But by reading his letters, I can look over his shoulder as he writes.  I can stop him and say, “So that’s where you got the idea for Aslan.”  Or I can ramble contentedly with him on walking tours through England on winter mornings with mist as “tangible as treacle” or on summer evenings with golden light so “liquid” one can almost drink it.  Through his letters I can become his friend, without his even knowing I’m there.

C.S. (”Jack”) Lewis would have had no patience with what we are about to do: discuss his personal life.  “I have no natural curiosity about private lives,” he wrote to one friend and to another, “…we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us.”

In response to a request for “background information” from an American minister in 1948, the British author of The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote back, in a rare burst of pique, ‘Ought you, as a Pastor, to encourage the public demand for quite irrelevant facts about authors?… I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books shd. be ‘set in their biographical context’ and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare of Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works.”  In the same letter he declared, “…the only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say.”

But since, at 17, he was the first one to suggest publishing his letters and since in those letters he gives us glimpses of his private life, he might not mind our extracting from them what he had to say about himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Book review, C.S. Lewis, Jessica Shaver Renshaw, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis

Dear friends,

It saddens me greatly to inform you that our dear sister and Member of our Board of Trustees, Pat Scileppi, has gone on to be with the Lord and a great company of the saints. As a great, warm-hearted, bold and prayerful professor who truly did live an exemplary life of faith and scholarship that touched the lives of many, she will be greatly missed.

Yet in another very real sense, notwithstanding many prayers appropriately and faithfully lifted up on her behalf for her complete healing, it was not to be and, in this, we rest in the will of her loving heavenly Father. The last several months have been particularly difficult for Pat. My several visits with her over this period evidenced her rapid decline and very evident loss of any quality of life. We shared many things and prayed and even sang together, as recently as two weeks ago - it was a visit of mutual thanksgiving for the gift of real and mutual friendship and of trust in Christ.

In each instance, I expressed deep gratitude and prayerful support for her on the part of the Board and her friends at the Foundation. For this she was clearly most appreciative, and repeatedly expressed her keen support for our mission to the very end (which, to quote Lewis, is, of course, not at all “the end” but, rather, “the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story.”

Please do pray for the members of Pat’s immediate family.

For a brief biography of Pat’s life, see below for an excerpt from her obituary.

Yours for the journey,

Stan

Here is an excerpt from her obituary:

Patricia A. Scileppi, Professor, Author and Mother, Dies at 63

Patricia Ann Scileppi, born March 7, 1945 in Brooklyn, New York, went to The Lord on February 9, 2009.  Pat came to Riverside in 1962 with her parents, Eugene and Carmen Scileppi.

She taught Speech and Interpersonal Communication at RCC from 1969 until her retirement in 2007 as a result of cancer.  She co-authored the book We Shall Be Heard, the first anthology of American women speakers and pioneered a values-based communication textbook How Then Shall We Live?. Her stunning career impacted the lives of thousands.

In 1996, Pat founded the Fellowship of Catholic Christian Women at St. Catherine’s of Alexandria parish.  It has since expanded to 17 parishes in California.  She is survived by her daughter, Victoria Kennedy, of Murrieta, California and son and daughter-in-law Eugene and Jennifer Kennedy of Salt Lake City, Utah.

In lieu of flowers, please consider honoring her by making a donation to:  The Professor Scileppi Interpersonal Communication Scholarship Fund, Riverside Community College Foundation, 4800 Magnolia Ave, Riverside, CA 92506-1299, Tel (951)222-8626

The funeral will be Thursday Feb. 12th at 11 a.m. at St. Catherine’s of Alexandria followed by a reception and burial.

Tags: Patricia Scileppi

Since C.S. Lewis’ death in 1963, many Christian writers have seen him as a role model and have tried to emulate his success at making difficult theological concepts understandable to the average reader.  In an article written last August in the Wall Street Journal, David Skeel discusses Lewis’ legacy and how recent apologists have fared in writing books in the vein of “Mere Christianity.”

Please read below for an excerpt of David Skeel’s article “Apres Lewis.”  If you have read any of the books Skeel discusses or you have read other similar books to recommend or critique, please leave a comment on our blog by clicking where it gives the number of Comments below the post.

Recently a friend assured me that a book by a well-known evangelical Christian was the new “Mere Christianity.” For an evangelical this possibly cryptic statement needs no explanation. As evangelicals, we are called to evangelize — to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Most of us also are surrounded by friends and co-workers who may be curious about our beliefs. And for over 55 years, Christians have turned to C.S. Lewis’s little book “Mere Christianity” for both of these reasons.

But much has changed in the last half-century. There is the constant hope that, even if it falls short of its prototype, a work of Christian apologetics will take its place alongside Lewis and help to explain Christianity to a new generation of readers, especially to skeptics. Even before Sam Harris and other atheists began scaling the best-seller lists, evangelicals were searching for a new “Mere Christianity,” and evangelical writers were trying to write it.

The best of the contenders can be divided into two types. Some take a “scientific” approach, trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Christ was indeed the son of God who came to save us from our sins. For many years the leading example was “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” (1972) by Josh McDowell; the new superstar is Lee Strobel. The central theme for both authors is a trial, in which all the evidence will be weighed… More

Tags: C.S. Lewis, David Skeel, Mere Christianity