Getting Mr. Lewis's Six

I've recently read several times that Christians should opt out of the culture war. If there is a culture war, and my experiences (especially those in Europe) lead me to believe there is, I think it would be best if Christians did not dodge its draft. The reasons are obvious: as Christians we are the only ones suitably equipped for battle, and we make up the bulk of our army, with soldiers of all ranks and areas of training.

But perhaps the war metaphor should not be extended in this way, for our weapons are love, hope, truth and forgiveness -- and our casualties are not the loss of life but of despair and absurdity.

Nonetheless, when reading articles such as Polly Toynbee's rabid (not to mention ill-informed) attack on the Narnia Chronicles, its hard to avoid such imagery. Toynbee of course uses Philip Pullman to back up her claims.

An illustration of this man: if C.S. Lewis is our Churchill, Pullman is Hitler. He has made a career out of being the antithesis of Lewis. Whereas Lewis soundly defended Christianity with reason, Pullman seeks to tear it down with rhetoric. Like Lewis, Pullman promotes his worldview with children's literature. Unlike Lewis, though, who wrote in a dazzling variety of genres, Pullman can't leave children's books without embarassment, as even interviews will make clear. Nothing is more revealing than his utterly irrational and inordinate hatred of C.S. Lewis.

His attacks, and the attacks of those fighting with him, often claim that Lewis was racist, sexist, violent, life-denying and loveless. As anyone who knows anything about Lewis and/or his writings can attest, it is hard to say which of these accusations is more absurd. Yet they persist. How gratifying, then, to see Michael Nelson give a very good defense against them. The venue in which this defense is printed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, is especially encouraging to me, and I hope that the purveyors of these lies give it a good look. The only flaw that I can see in the article is its brevity. But then again, the examples available to refute Pullman and the rest are practically innumerable, and to list them all would take much more space than the Chronicle is willing to give. And anyhow, how much evidence does it really take to convince a reasonable person of Lewis' virtue?

Academia Nuts #1

As a bit of background, the textbook for my business communication class this semester, which has 246 black and white pages in a thin paperback volume and was written by Robyn Walker who also teaches the class, cost me $67.75 before taxes.

Now read this quote from said book: "Ethnocentrism is the belief that your own cultural background, including ways of analyzing problems, values, beliefs, language, and verbal and nonverbal communication is correct."

Read it again. Apparently, you are an ethnocentrist if you believe your values and beliefs to be correct. In other words, you are an ethnocentrist if you believe anything at all. Does anyone believe something that he believes to be false? Clearly that would be nonsense, and so is this description of ethnocentrism.

This is the kind of failure of reason that's becoming more and more common as the a priori assumptions of the "politically correct" orthodoxy are shoehorned into our reality. Read this definition of the same subject in the margin here: "Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's own cultural background is correct, and that other cultures are somehow inferior."

"Somehow." As if it is really so difficult to think of ways one culture might be inferior to another. I'm sure that if Professor Walker gave the matter some hard honest thought--thirty seconds, say--she could think of a culture or two that are or were inferior to her own. She might feel guilty about suddenly becoming an "ethnocentrist," but that wouldn't make it any less true.