Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: C.S. Lewis and friends (was Re: Sorry folks, it's NOT all relative.) Message-ID: Date: 12 Nov 90 01:53:58 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK. Lines: 38 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article cotner@oreo.berkeley.edu writes: >>>On a related note, Does anyone know about any other Christian novelists/ >>>Christian writers rather in the vein of C.S. Lewis? >> >>A good person to try is G.K. Chesterton. Most of his stuff was written 20 >>or 30 years before Lewis, but the style is similar. > >G.K.C. is my favorite author, and I highly recommend him, too. Two >more of his best are the biographies _St. Francis of Assisi_ and _Saint >Thomas Aquinas "The Dumb Ox"_. His principle philosophical work on Christianity is "The Everlasting Man" - well worth reading if you can get hold of a copy. His work is difficult to find however - he is mostly remembered today for his Fr.Brown detective stories, and these are the only thing of his still in print, though collections of parts of his works were published on the 50th anniversary of his death (1986). I am a member of the G.K.Chesteron society, though I can't remember the contact address at the moment. Chesterton is usually coupled with Hillaire Belloc, who is also worth reading, though with care. Belloc was somewhat anti-semitic, usually in a joky way, but he was rather obsessive about it - it all looks a lot nastier after Hitler. Chesterton seemed to be led slightly in this way by Belloc, and the result is that the reputation of both writers suffered badly after Hitler (when neither was alive to defend himself). Both Chesterton and Belloc's political comments show remarkable foresight. They attacked socialism as bound to lead to all the sorts of malpractices we have come to associate with it today, and which led to its downfall in Eastern Europe, this at a time when most of the intelligentsia were extremely pro-socialist, and not even its critics saw how it would develop. Again this led them to be dismissed as right-wing cranks, although their politics was almost equally anti-capitalist. Matthew Huntbach