WSJ: Flaherty on CS Lewis

December 20, 2010 Mike C.S. Lewis, Narnia Books, Narnia Film News, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Movie News, Walden Media 13

Michael FlahertyTuesday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal features an op-ed by Walden Media President Micheal Flaherty.

Flaherty’s piece is a response to recent comments by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who includes C.S. Lewis among her favorite authors, and criticism of Palin by Joy Behar, a court jester comedienne and talk show host.

Hit the jump for more details.

You can read the full text on the Journal’s website by clicking here, but the following is perhaps the article’s best quote:

Mrs. Palin is on the right track by giving C.S. Lewis a prominent place on her reading list. Yet Ms. Behar and other Palin critics have dismissed Lewis’s work, forgetting that Lewis was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics. Ms. Behar’s dismissal of children’s books as less than important makes her a modern-day Eustace, the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons.

Indeed.  How could a self-identified Catholic like Ms. Behar fail to realize Lewis not only wrote the children’s books she sneers at, but is also repeatedly included on lists of the 20th century’s most prominent Christian theologians?

Someone better get Behar a copy of “Mere Christianity” for Christmas.

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13 Comments

  1. It´s all politics. I think Mrs. Palin and Ms Behar should visit Coriakin´s house, to hear that of “To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself” Just kiddin´ 🙂

  2. Anyone who thought Joy Behar was making a literary critique of C. S. Lewis just doesn’t understand comedy. Call me cynical, but I think Walden Media was just using this joke as an opportunity to get some free advertisement for their movie.

    • CJ, this wasn’t just a joke. Barbara Walters had to give Behar a little lecture on who C.S. Lewis was. Why would she has done this if it were clear that Behar was merely joking? This was not a one-time thing; someone on Chris Matthews also suggested that C.S. Lewis was a silly choice for Palin to pick because he writes “kids books.” We all need to be realistic here and accept that not everyone is well read and that there are indeed people out there who only know about C.S. Lewis from these Narnia films, so they think he’s a children’s book writer.

      I’m glad to see a defense of Lewis; however, I wish Flaherty had mentioned Lewis’s scholarly works and his prominence as an academic, so that more people will realize that Lewis was anything but a lightweight.

      I take it that Flaherty is a C.S. Lewis fan. I wish to God that Walden Media (or really *any* reputable film studio) would do Lewis’s Space Trilogy. That has the potential to look awesome on the big screen and to have much more meaning than the average sci-fi flick.

    • Cynical, perhaps, but not enough to refrain from using the tired “you don’t get the joke” excuse for stupidity. Behar belied the nature of Lewis’ books to question the intelligence of an American political figure, in the process overlooking volumes of scholarship that are anything but children’s books. The irony is that, in so doing, Behar made herself look like the idiot.

  4. Joy Behar may have been raised Catholic, but has left the church long ago. She has a Master of Arts degree in English education, yet she does not know much about CS Lewis, one of the giants of English literature. Looks like she is on the highway to hell and stupid as well

  6. I don’t know where to begin… first of all, when someone who claims to read “all the newspapers” and “see Russia from the backyard” suddenly claims to like a story that’s in vogue at the moment, I am skeptical at best.

    Secondly, Mike is absolutely right that Behar has severely underrated Lewis… but having just seen the Dawn Treader film, I am forced to conclude that Walden Media is also underrating him quite badly. The man was, among other impressive things, a Classics Master, meaning that he knew the stories which Humanity has held to be both popular and “true” for THOUSANDS OF YEARS like the back of his hand. He knew what made them tick, and knew how to weave his own material around the older ideas (Bacchus and Prometheus, just to name two, appear quite directly in the Narnia books, Silver Chair leans heavily on the Orpheus tale, and so on). Lewis also knew duty, honor, et cetera from the view of a World War One military officer: “Honoring the fallen” was quite reason enough for brave men to undertake a voyage that a brave man should desire to attempt anyway by his very nature. Dawn Treader, the book, is a good and complete tale of its own. Adding in a contemporary, stereotypical, good vs. evil plot cheapens the whole thing quite badly, and makes it clear that Walden Media does not grasp what it is dealing with.

    • the “seeing russia from my backyard” was only a joke made up by comedienne Tina Fey.

  8. Joy may be more accurately identified as a “cafeteria catholic”. She was baptized catholic but doesn’t agree with the most basic tenets of the faith and listening to her criticize a religion she doesn’t even understand is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

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