Search Society Blog

Thursday, July 14, 2011

August 11th Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church

Our reading for the August meeting will be on the Essay Collection Faith, Christianity and the Church. This is a comprehensive essay collection of 67 essays which Lewis wrote on these themes. This collection, edited by Lesley Walmsley, is composed of the religious essays and letters from her definitive collection of 135 essays and letters titled Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces.

Neither volume appears to be in print currently however there are fairly inexpensive volumes of this available at second hand vendors and many of the essays can be found in other volumes of Lewis essays.

A useful resource when looking for where a Lewis essay might be found at a page I composed at the C.S. Lewis Wiki-Spaces site titled SHORT PIECES. A quick review shows that to get most of these essays you'd need at least five essay volumes and that you can't get them all without buying this volume. But if you want most you could have it if you have: 1) God In The Dock 2) Christian Reflections 3) Weight of Glory 4) The World's Last Night and 5) Present Concerns. And if you have all five of those volumes you'd still be missing some of the content here. So it's a good investment if you like having a one-stop reference for Lewis's essays on Faith, Christianity and the Church.

Since the amount of the material is so large I'd recommend that people coming to the meeting find a few favorites among the many essays in the volume or some of the volumes mentioned above and prepare to explain a little about what the essay says and why you liked it. Then if you can link it a little with another essay all the better.

The meetings are the second Thursday of each month at the Harrisonburg Barnes and Noble at 7:30 p.m. The group meets at the cluster of chairs in the back of the store at the right. Some members almost always show up at Panera's around 6:30 p.m. to eat dinner before the meeting and others grab coffee and a scone or other goodie at the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble.

No comments:

Post a Comment