In my latest Epoch Times column I say the reason for having one day set aside for Thanksgiving is to help us be more grateful every day… and act on it.

“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“In the second half of A Preface to Paradise Lost, [C.S.] Lewis defended his approach to literary criticism and the artistry of Milton against the recent trend in literary theory represented by I.A. Richards, D.G. James, and T.S. Eliot. His opponents deplored the stock responses to moral questions they found in Paradise Lost. Lewis countered that society would do well to recover Milton's stock responses to pride, treachery, pain, and death.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.

“To have no philosophy is to have a bad philosophy.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [quoting a letter around Christmas 1928 to his brother Warren (“Warnie”) in China in which Lewis insisted that the line was original with him].

“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“That religion which God requires, and will accept, does not consist in weak, dull, lifeless wishes, raising us but a little above a state of indifference. God in His Word, greatly insists upon it, that we be in good earnest, fervent in spirit, and our hearts vigorously engaged in mercies.”

Jonathan Edwards quoted in Federalist Patriot No. 04-32 August 9, 2004 from Federalist.com.

“‘Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,’ said Turnbull, smiling. ‘Oh, Where is that?’ said MacIan. Turnbull said bitterly, ‘In a book,’ and the silence fell suddenly between them again.”

G.K. Chesterton The Ball and the Cross, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)