Saturday, March 20, 2010

Another like C. S. Lewis ?

I haven't been blogging much of late, nor visiting many blogs, just those of a few well-gifted friends, and I have nothing of my own to post at the moment. I just wanted to bring to your attention a new book—and I the anti-apostle of books, for sake of The Book!

Visiting Fr Milovan's blog, I was directed to Fr Stephen's blog, and then to a news page, and finally to a landing page advertising this new book by an author whom I'd never heard of, but who, I think, may be another like C. S. Lewis, a former atheist graciously apostatized into the Christian faith. This author is Peter Hitchens, relatively unknown brother of the more famous Christopher Hitchens, outspoken, public atheist. (From a comment posted on Fr Milovan's blog by orrologion, I learned that Christopher Hitchens is also a "formal" apostate Greek Orthodox, as he was chrismated into Orthodoxy before marrying his first wife, a Greek Cypriot.)

From a single quotation in Fr Stephen's post, I was able to discern that here we have a formidable confessor, one apt for our anti-Christian age, and drawn no less from the bowels of the mother of latter-day impiety and even from her favored class, the world intelligentsia. Peter Hitchens writes,
Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. 
The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.
Perhaps on the surface it may seem he is not saying much, not much that we didn't already know, but I have a feeling that this brief thought is the tip of an iceberg, one that can withstand the effects of the all-pervasive and over-confident global warming of the world culture, as it tries to steer us all into the abyss.

If you have time and inclination, check out that news page linked above, and read a little more of what this Peter Hitchens has to say. Not that Lewis doesn't still speak, even in this day and age, but perhaps he will be joined by another who speaks out of and into the particular world of today.

God be with you, brethren, as we finish our temptation in the wilderness before Pascha, and let's stay together and follow our Lord and Master to His life-giving death in Jerusalem, so that we can witness again His resurrection, hidden as it is from the world.

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