From Crisis-C.S. Lewis was not Catholic, much less a theologian who teaches with an authority Catholics are obliged to recognize. As an eloquent proponent of natural law and the close colleague of important Catholic writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Elizabeth Anscombe, however, the Anglican Lewis is surely someone whose significance we must acknowledge. Unfortunately, among some there is a tendency to celebrate an imaginary Lewis, a tame conservative establishmentarian who opposes atheism, abortion, and human cloning but would otherwise fit nicely into a post-1960s dispensation of multiculturalism and working mothers. Such sanitizing of Lewis is unfortunate not because he was always right, but because we cannot possibly benefit from our conversations with the finest minds of the past until we are ready to listen to what such minds actually have to say.
“By learning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell risqué stories,” observes Lewis, the supposedly emancipated modern girl has not really “drawn an inch nearer to the men than her grandmother.” Moreover, he adds, “her grandmother was far happier and more realistic. She was at home talking real women’s talk to other women and perhaps doing so with great charm, sense and even wit.” There are “sensible women,” but at a mixed party such women are wont to “gravitate to one end of the room and talk women’s talk to one another,” for they know full well that “it is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other.” So much for co-ed dorms. Or, for that matter, co-ed colleges.
More here-
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/not-tame-lion-deplorable-c-s-lewis
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