Dr Paul Allen

I can’t say I ever expected to discuss the theological implications of a movie based on Barbie dolls. And yet, Barbie is dominating headlines, not only for bringing in a whopping 155 million dollars on its opening weekend but also for garnering thought pieces on the deeper meaning of its plot and for its cultural implications about the identity and value of women. A Vox article, for example, compared its plot to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, with a primal couple living in a paradise before newly discovered knowledge about good and evil taints the world with corruption. Whether or not director Greta Gerwig intended that particular angle, her Barbie not only engages with contemporary discussions about feminism but also the biggest of worldview questions, such as “What’s the meaning of life?” “What has gone wrong with the world?” and “What will fix the world?”  In the process, Barbie tells a story of the world that, beneath its shiny colours and self-aware snark, more cl...

In The Globdrop Letters, a senior demon (Wormwood) corresponds with a junior demon (Globdrop) to advise him in the evil art of subtle deception. This article follows in the large footsteps of C.S. Lewis in his classic work, The Screwtape Letters. Dear Blogmaster, I’ve had the misfortune of receiving the protestation you called a letter. My favourite line was when you asked how we (your superiors) could expect you (a mere afterthought) to damn souls with all those bombs exploding night and day outside your barracks? You assume Glubgore and our Cannon Battalion are engaged in endless target practice. This, your great error is somewhat understandable. Headquarters may have, I admit, exaggerated our current position in the war. They did not want to unsettle morale, you see, and thus their reports these past centuries make it perhaps unthinkable that the unpleasant tremor at our gates could be, in reality, the Enemy’s troops firing upon us. But so it is. The humans, though mostl...

Christ Pantocrator study (Photo credit: DUCKMARX ) The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact—just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument . The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.  The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong...

English: Illumination of Christ before Pilate Deutsch: Jesus vor Pilatus (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) He did not leave us that option: he did not intend to." Thus C. S. Lewis closes out his famous "Trilemma" argument on the impossibility of Jesus being a great moral teacher and nothing more. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity: it calls for no deep familiarity with New Testament theology or history, only knowledge of the Gospels themselves, and some understanding of human nature. A man claiming to be God, says Lewis, could hardly be good unless he really was God. If Jesus was not the Lord, then (to borrow Josh McDowell 's alliterative version of the argument), he must have been a liar or a lunatic. Christian apologists have responded with arguments hinging on the correct dates for the composition of the Gospels, the identities of their authors, external corroborating evidence, and the like. All this has been enormously helpful, but one could wish for a m...

 "I am the Good Shepherd" (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11).  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You may have heard C.S. Lewis' Trilemma challenge?. Your local university teacher maybe a skeptic, but happy to expose students to good thinking even if he didn't believe what the Bible taught about Jesus. But believes there is a fourth possibility: The Gospels are legends. Tom Gilson has written an excellent new article in Touchstone . He considers this fourth possibility in an interesting way. It's not only about how a legend about a man called Jesus developed. It's about how four separate legends about a man called Jesus with a uniquely good character and great power developed independently and remarkably similar. It's easy to miscalculate what this would require, and Tom thinks it through very carefully and in an extremely helpful way. In order for the legend hypothesis to hold water, there must be a plausible explanation for the genesis o...

Cover of The Everlasting Man C.S. Lewis is among the most influential Christian writers of the twentieth century.  Most people are somewhat surprised to learn that Lewis, who was dutifully reared in a traditional Christian household in Ireland, actually became an avowed atheist in his early teens while attending public school at the prestigious Malvern College in England. It would be years later, after World War I and well into his years at Oxford University, before he began his great search for a deeper and richer understanding of God’s existence. Lewis writes that there were two events in his life that ultimately led him to the Christian faith . The first step began when he read G. K. Chesterton’s book, Everlasting Man , and the second, he has written, had a “shattering impact” on him. This event occurred one night when one of the more militant atheists on the Oxford faculty staff, a man by the name of T. D. Weldon, came to his room and confided that he believed that th...

C.S. Lewis was a twentieth-century novelist, Christian apologist , and lay theologian. Today marks the 50th anniversary of his death. You can find more resources on C.S. Lewis here . November 22, 1963, the date of President Kennedy's assassination , was also the day C.S. Lewis died. Seven years earlier he had thus described death: "The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." The metaphor inherent in these words is striking. It comes from the world of students and pupils, but only a teacher would employ it as a metaphor for death. The words (from The Last Battle) bring down the curtain — or perhaps better, close the wardrobe door — on Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. But they also open a window into who C.S. Lewis really was. The Student . Clive Staples Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland , the second son of Albert Lewis , a promising attorney and his wife, Florence (...