Category Archives: Articles

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Fire on the Mountain

The path through the trees was narrow and overgrown, meandering its way through birch, oak and elm, climbing gently as it wound its way up from the valley. A few minutes walking brought me to the ancient moss-laden wall that surrounded the forest, from which a wooden gate led out on the hillside. From there the track quickly steepened as it wound sinuously up toward the mountaintop. I paused every so often to catch my breath, turning to watch the cloud shadows chase one another across the flanks of the hills on the far side of the valley.

Onwards and upwards I climbed, as the first hints of dusk began to take hold and the shadows grew longer. I gained the summit ridge just as the westering sun was beginning to sink behind a bank of clouds hanging over the distant Langdale Pikes, among the most well known of Lakeland’s hills and loved by the poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.[1]

Suddenly, as the sun dropped completely behind the cloudbank, the whole sky turned the colour of burnished gold and the clouds themselves lit up as if on fire, a maelstrom of red, orange and ochre, with the occasional flash of silver. At that moment, through a gap in the clouds poured a great ray of sunshine, streaming into the valley below like a searchlight and throwing into stark relief the lines of fields, lanes and hedgerows.

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Richard Dawkins: Running Away from the Debate?

The New Atheism, the insanely popular movement that in the 2000s made celebrities of many atheists, has all but collapsed. Christopher Hitchens is dead. Sam Harris has become a figure of fun. Daniel Dennett has retreated behind his beard and his study door. Lesser-known figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali now claim they’re Christian. And then there’s Richard Dawkins.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: A Most Unlikely Convert?

A few weekends ago I was with friends in Oxford and we took a wander along Addison’s Walk, a pretty tree-lined footpath that rambles beside the River Cherwell. It’s a walk steeped in spiritual history for it was on an evening stroll here in 1931 that C. S. Lewis had a deep conversation with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson which helped him take a massive leap forward toward Christianity.

Lewis had become a believer in god two years earlier, after a decades-long journey from atheism. He had been driven in part by the realisation that all that he loved—art, music, beauty, culture, truth—made no sense on atheism. A growing realisation that he wasn’t so much seeking god as being pursued, led to the dramatic moment:

In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most reluctant convert in all England.[1]

It shows how much Christians have canonised St. Lewis of Oxford that we often quote that story with excitement (“Look how the great atheist fell!”) without appreciating that Lewis’s initial conversion is a bit insipid. It took the later conversation with Tolkien and Dyson to help complete his spiritual journey. Lewis wrote:

I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.[2]

I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s unconventional and circuitous road to faith when I read with shock the recent announcement that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a Christian.[3] If you’re unaware of Ali, she is a public intellectual, author and women’s right’s activist, but also famous as a fiery atheist, former Muslim and later fierce critic of Islam, her criticism driven by the hatred and violence she had seen both in her first-hand experiences as well in as Islam’s core texts.[4]

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Far More Than Fantasy: The Enduring Appeal of The Lord of the Rings

Twenty years on, I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement as we sat in the packed cinema, the house lights dimmed, and the title card for The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on the screen. A cheer arose from the wildly enthusiastic audience (who had queued for several hours to get into this first screening) as the words of Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett) solemnly intoned: “The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”[1]

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For What It’s Worth

A Reflection on the Question of Human Value

A couple of years ago, some good friends of ours suffered a devastating house fire. They woke at 3am to the smell of smoke, discovered a kitchen blaze that had already spread to the lounge and the hall, and so they grabbed their kids, the cat, two guinea pigs, and (at the insistence of their six-year-old) a glass tank containing three stick insects, and fled to the safety of a neighbour’s house, from where they called the fire brigade. By the time two fire tenders had arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing, it was too late—the fire had taken hold and although the hoses dosed the flames, almost everything was destroyed. “We lost virtually every possession,” our friends said afterwards, “but at least nobody was hurt. Not even a stick insect was left behind.”

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Monarchs, Mortality, and Meaning

On Monday 19th September I gathered with a small group of family and friends to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We were not alone—almost four billion people globally watched the service from Westminster Abbey.

I found the funeral profoundly moving but although there was sadness, the service was not in the slightest way depressing, for the Queen’s funeral was deeply and thoroughly Christian, saturated throughout with a message of joy and hope, the good news that for the follower of Jesus, death is not the end. As the final hymn that the Queen herself had chosen proclaimed:

Finish then thy new creation,
pure and spotless let us be;
let us see thy great salvation,
perfectly restored in thee,
changed from glory into glory
till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise!

Existential Despair?

But not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted:

Not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted:

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Why Are the Best Stories About Good and Evil?

     A strong contender for the four most well-known words in the English language must arguably be: “Once upon a time …” Whether we are children or adults, we love stories; indeed our love of stories is something uniquely human. From the earliest recorded cave paintings to the most modern movie, across time, country, and culture, humans are a storytelling species.

     As a child, I loved nothing better than to lose myself in a novel. Now I am a parent, I’ve passed on this love to my children—they don’t care (that) much for television, but their rooms are lined with books. Shortly before writing these words, I was curled up in bed with my six-year old son reading him the first volume of the brilliant Wingfeather Saga; there were mighty protests of “Dad! Just one more chapter!” when I closed the book.

     Some stories are here today and gone tomorrow, but others become classics, retold to generation after generation. When a story is first written, it’s hard to tell whether it will become a classic but I would suggest that one thing most of the great stories, the classic tales, all have in common is they are built around a common theme: the triumph of good over evil.

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“On Living in an Atomic Age” — C. S. Lewis

In 1948, C. S. Lewis wrote this profound little essay, “On Living in An Atomic Age”. Just five pages long, it seems incredibly timely — and as challenging (and encouraging) as it was when it was first written. Here’s the opening …

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

… you can download the entire essay here.

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The Smuggled Value Judgement

The English village of Hayle is typically picturesque, a small cluster of cottages set around a harbour, looking out to the tranquil waters of St. Ive’s bay. But like so much of England, layers of darker history lie beneath the pretty-as-a-postcard facade. Hidden behind the undergrowth in the garden of what was once the local youth hostel, yawns the mouth of a tunnel. Stoop to step inside its cool darkness and one can walk for hundreds of yards, eventually emerging beneath the cliffs on a nearby cove. Although dank and musty now, local legend identifies this as an ancient “Smuggler’s Tunnel”, once used for bringing illegal contraband ashore under cover of darkness.

The coastal towns and villages of England are full of tales of such tunnels, many dating back centuries to when smuggling was at its height. On moonless nights, sailing ships would pull quietly into bays like that at Hayle, offload their illicit cargo into smaller boats and bring it ashore. There the contraband would be hauled across the sands, carried through tunnels, or even manhandled up sheer cliff faces to a waiting line of locals who would spirit it away. Whole communities benefited from the smuggling trade and the customs men, whose job it was to thwart the black market trade, were often foiled by a stone wall of silence. As Rudyard Kipling, who grew up on the English coast and knew these stories well, wrote in his poem “A Smuggler’s Song”:

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
‘Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by![1]

When you heard the sound of horses, or the whispers of voices late at night, you were supposed to look the other way, ask no questions, ‘watch the wall’, as the contraband was smuggled past.

horseToday, the smuggling business is alive and well, only it is not tobacco or brandy that are secreted past, but value judgements. You see, whenever a writer tells you that something is good and laudable, or that something is bad and condemnable, there is an important question you must ask before you consider whether or not to believe them. What worldview do they subscribe to and does that worldview support the value judgement they are making, or are they having to smuggle it in from outside, hoping that everybody will look the other way?