What is nature doing in Lewis's Abolition of Man?
Come hear this and other presentations at the Undiscovered Lewis Conference, Sept 5-8, 2024!
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I'll be presenting at the Undiscovered Lewis Conference this coming September at George Fox University (registration is at the link above). This is rumored to be the largest Lewis conference ever convened in the U.S. Why not join me there?
Friend Joe Ricke has described the conference as follows:
The conference intends to showcase new and/or lesser-known scholarship on Lewis (from our keynote speakers and dozens of panels of scholarly papers), theatrical productions, an exclusive pre-screening of a Lewis and Tolkien documentary, and much more. The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference celebrates the camaraderie, imagination, and faith of this great author and the many scholars and enthusiasts who follow in his footsteps.
Here's the skinny on my presentation:
Title * What Is Nature Doing in Lewis’s Abolition of Man?
Key theme(s) * Lewis and participatory ontology
Abstract *
If Lewis’s Abolition of Man is simply an argument for objective moral value, then why begin with waterfalls that demand of us certain kinds of aesthetic judgment and end by saying that technocrats who take Nature in their own hands have stepped outside of something larger than moral law and thereby lost their very humanity? Because Lewis taught that Creation participates in God himself. And he did so (1) at a moment when the separation of nature and supernature had become a matter for intense discussion, and (2) in harmony with such fellow Christian humanists as the Catholic nouvelle theologians (or ressourcement theologians).