Walter Hooper

Did Lewis & Tolkien Plan to Write Together?

  • Oct 02, 2009
  • Uncategorized
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Did C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien collaborate on a project that was never published? It is well known that the two were close friends and relished each other’s praise and criticism. However, there is little evidence that the two intended on working together on any manuscript. Steven A. Beebe, professor …

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Jack the Blogger?

  • Sep 02, 2009
  • Bruce L. Edwards
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Our continued affection for and the extended appeal of C. S. Lewis more than 45 years after his death, so near the end of the first decade of the supposedly post-postmodern 21st Century, suggests to me two things about him and his work that may seem patently obvious. Except for …

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C.S. Lewis Sat Here

  • Aug 20, 2009
  • Will Vaus
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The first time I visited Oxford, in 1982, the porter at Magdalen College didn’t even recognize the name— C. S. Lewis. I had asked him if he could give me directions to Lewis’s former home in Headington Quarry. Obviously he could not and did not. Things have changed a lot …

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Mere Christianity: “Making Righteousness Readable"

  • Jul 20, 2009
  • David C. Downing
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C. S. Lewis’s earliest biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, wrote that if they were going to a desert island and could take only one Lewis book, it would probably be Mere Christianity. That’s a fascinating choice, considering that both men were thoroughly acquainted with Lewis’s whole body of …

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A Picture-Perfect Look at the Inklings’ Oxford

  • Jul 01, 2009
  • David C. Downing
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If you can’t make it to Oxford any time soon, perhaps the next best thing would be to get yourself a copy of The Inklings of Oxford, with text by Harry Lee Poe and photographs by James Ray Veneman (Zondervan, 2009). And if you are going to Oxford, you might …

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Education and The Abolition of Man

  • Jun 17, 2009
  • David Naugle
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“I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.” Professor Kirke, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe In his relatively recent book Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1999), the noted postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty describes the attitude of American pragmatic culture as the “refusal to believe in …

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Learning In War-Time

  • Jun 10, 2009
  • Joel Heck
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In 1938, Somerville College English Fellow Helen Darbishire told the Somerville Council in Oxford that “it would be advisable to ascertain, if possible, whether in the event of an international emergency, university education would continue, and, if so, on what basis.” One can imagine conversations between Darbishire, Lewis, and other …

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The Hard Knock at the Door of Christianity

  • Aug 05, 2008
  • Harvey Solganick
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While reforming my faith, accepting Christ, against the “hard knock” of agnosticism, humanism, and atheism, I noticed a perilous, parallel philosophical journey taken by C.S. Lewis in response to his own battle with his Christian walk. Lewis constantly retained an admiring endearment to his teacher, W. T. Kirkpatrick, or as …

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Duty with a Stamp: “Half My Life is Spent Answering Letters”

  • May 15, 2008
  • Andrew Cuneo
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When the third volume of C.S. Lewis’s Collected Letters came out in 2006, it did not receive nearly the attention it deserved. Its publication, however, marked the summit of assembling and editing which Walter Hooper almost single-handedly accomplished in the space of eight years. But where were the mainstream reviews …

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