My C S Lewis lecture - now on the L'Abri Podcast
Exploring the Great Dance and the discarded image of medieval hierarchy
Edited to add the link to the podcast:
The Great Dance: C S Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy and the discarded image of medieval hierarchy is now available on the English L’Abri Podcast! Why not give it a listen and tell me what you think?
[Original email:]
It’s tonight! I’ll be back at English L’Abri to give my C S Lewis lecture, The Great Dance: C S Lewis and the Discarded Image of Medieval Hierarchy.
Our culture views power and authority with the greatest of suspicion. Exploring Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength with reference to their medieval sources I look at how C S Lewis and the medieval tradition can help us not simply assert the truth of a Biblical view of authority, but see and live out its beauty and goodness.
Join online
To join the lecture via Zoom, follow the link below. The password is ‘Lecture’. It will also be available online as a podcast afterwards.
For more about L’Abri Fellowship, including the full Friday Night Lecture schedule, visit www.englishlabri.org.
First thoughts
No full essay today with the lecture to finish preparing but I’ll share my first impressions on a couple of the things I’ve watched recently…
Dune: Part One
I saw Dune in IMAX with skeleton-rattling Atmos sound. It was a very impressive film, with incredible design and some great performances. But despite the supposed heat of Arrakis, it felt rather cold emotionally.
Part of that is down to the nature of the source material, and to be fair Denis Villeneuve has some good scenes humanising the characters (an early one between Paul Atrides and his father Leto is a standout).
But overall I found it easier to admire than get caught up in. Perhaps on a smaller screen it will be easier to engage with emotionally rather than being overwhelmed by the sound and visuals?
Doctor Who: Flux - The Halloween Apocalypse
Or as it might have been titled, Doctor Who and the Kitchen Sink.
Doctor Who is back! But given that I ran Impossible Podcasts, a Doctor Who fan site for 5 years, I wasn’t as excited about that as you might expect, and that’s largely due to how lacklustre the writing has been since Chris Chibnall took over as showrunner.
The novelty for this series is that it’s one continuous narrative, which meant that the first episode was all set-up. That gave it a certain zippiness as we got a slew of characters and situations.
But the problem I’ve always had with Chibnall’s writing is that it always feels like an AI-produced script. If you fed in Doctor Who’s 58-years-worth of scripts into a machine learning algorithm and randomly generated a script, I think Sunday’s episode is something like what it might produce: it’s got lots of the surface details of Doctor Who mashed up together - Victorians! Cheerful working class companion character! Space dogs! Weeping Angels! Sontarans! The end of the universe!
But what it lacks is a sense of dramatic or thematic purpose - there’s little or no sense that there’s an actual human being with ideas and opinions behind it. It just feels like a random remix, without any heart or soul to it.
I hope I’m wrong and that the sound and fury ends up signifying something. For now I wait and see!
If you watched Doctor Who or Dune, what did you think? Click through to this post on the web to leave your comments!