CS Lewis

C.S. Lewis 50th Anniversary Celebration

Check This Site and Listen to the Broadcasts 
for a
A selection of programmes that celebrate the novelist, academic and Christian apologist.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01l8hs8

http://www.cslewis.org/programs/50thcelebration/

CS Lewis included in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey

The stone has been placed in Poets' Corner, alongside renowned literary figures including Chaucer and Dickens.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams - a fan of his work - gave the main address at the ceremony.

Lewis, born in 1898, is best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, which has sold 100 million copies worldwide and been adapted for screen and stage.

His other work includes The Screwtape Letters and the Ransom Trilogy novels.

The writer was also a respected Oxford scholar and literary critic, while his book Mere Christianity was adapted from a series of BBC radio broadcasts, which sought to explain Christian teachings to a wider audience.

CS Lewis's memorial stone is set in the floor of Poets' Corner - though he was not known for poetry - and is inscribed with lines from one of his theological lectures : "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I can see it but because by it I can see everything else."

Around 1,000 guests from around the world attended the service to unveil the stone.

A prayer was read by the Rev Adrian Dorrian, the current rector of St Marks' church, Dundela, in Belfast, where the writer's grandfather was the first rector.

Douglas Gresham, the son of Lewis's wife Joy, spoke at the service. The story of the author's marriage to her was told in the film Shadowlands.

A conference looking at the impact of Lewis's work has also been taking place at the abbey, while a festival celebrating his life and work has been held in his hometown of Belfast.

Clive Staples Lewis - known as Jack to his family - died on 22 November 1963 at the age of 64, the same day President JF Kennedy was assassinated.

Other literary greats to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey's South Transept are Samuel Johnson, John Keats and the Bronte sisters.

From the BBC

Transformation - Inhotim

Images of Inhotim

From a Mining Site a Beautiful Garden

"It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns.A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact thatit needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined. If you want to seethe difference between its contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears and packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy and fecundity beside dead, sterile things. Just so, our "decency and common sense" show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love. And when the garden is in its full glory the gardener's contributions to that glory will still have been in a sense paltry compared with those of nature. Without life springing from the earth,without rain, light and heat descending from the sky, he could do nothing. When he has done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a different source. But his share,though small, is indispensable and laborious. When God planted a gardenHe set a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted thegarden of our nature and caused the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to "dress" them. Compared with them it is dry and cold. And unless His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall use this tool to little purpose. But its laborious - and largely negative - services are indispensable. If they were needed when the garden was still Paradisal,how much more now when the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem to thrive on it best? But heaven forbid we should work in the spirit of prigs and Stoics. While we hack and prune we know very well that what we are hacking and pruning is big with a splendour and vitality which our rational will could never of itself have supplied. To liberate that splendour,to let it become fully what it is trying to be, to have tall trees instead of scrubby tangles, and sweet apples instead of crabs, is part of our purpose." CSL