For all you CS Lewis fans out there who believed the only way to honor a man or woman is to name a college after him or her, your wishes have been fulfilled: http://www.cslewiscollege.org/index.html This will be a Christian-based school in the Great Books tradition (think St. John's in Maryland) in the wilds of rural western Massachusetts. Go figure.
I'm not even sure what to do with this post, I simply found it interesting (maybe we can start Tolkien University? Any takers?)
3 comments:
I'm not quite sure how CS Lewis merits having a college named after him. He was a pretty good medieval literary critic. But he was at best a passing novelist and definitely a light-weight theologian.
Where is the Wallace Stevens College or the Soren Kierkegaard College?
For an example of something Lewis did right, here is an excerpt from his well-known essay on "Courtly Love":
It seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. It seems -- or it seemed to us till lately -- a natural thing that love (under certain conditions) shoud be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St. Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become how far from natural it is.
In the list of authors who deserve colleges named after them, I have to agree that C. S. Lewis would be fairly far down on the list.
I'm not sure why, but I have read a lot of C. S. Lewis. The work I liked the best was "The Allegory of Love." Perhaps the essay "Courtly Love" was taken from that. It is a fairly exhaustive analysis of the strange cultural phenomenon of courtly love. It is not the easiest read.
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