C S Lewis News

The links to the information about the “Dawn Treader” ship used as a prop for the film are found below

http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2009/11/chronicles-of-narnia-voyage-of-the-dawn-treader.html?program=612_morning

and for the audio

http://blogs.abc.net.au/files/tour-of-narnia-set.mp3

The Abolition Of Man

The Abolition of Man is less than 100 pages in length.  It is the text of three lectures C. S. Lewis delivered to a college audience in 1943, and therefore it does not read quickly, as some of  the Chronicles of Narnia do. Despite this, it is well worth the time to read and study. It is considered one of the finest statements of what is known as “The Natural Law” available today. The book may be purchased from any of the on-line bookstores such as Amazon.com but the full text is also available on the web at

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm

There is a good discussion of the book’s content also on the web at

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/nelson_notes.html

The Wikipedia article on this book is short and quite helpful, and has some links that may be of interest.  It is found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_abolition_of_man

The book is divided into three chapters, each chapter corresponding to the one of the lectures Jack delivered. In the first lecture, “Men Without Chests”, Lewis describes what is happening “behind the scenes” in some recent textbooks intended to instruct British students in English. The books abandon the classical philosophy of Aristotle and Plato (and of Lewis) and substitute a relativistic approach.  Basically, the textbooks abandon the idea of an external moral code that is used to judge and direct human behavior. In “Men Without Chests” Jack describes the immediate result of this approach.  In the second lecture,”The Tao”, Jack describes the evidence for a universal law of right behavior and shows that it is impossible to formulate a new moral code without first assuming the existence of the traditional code. In the last section Lewis describes what may happen (and what may be happening today) when some men control what the rest of society is taught to think.