A Grief Observed
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A Grief Observed
''A Grief Observed'' is a collection of C. S. Lewis's reflections on his experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. The book was published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk because Lewis wished to avoid the connection. Though republished in 1963 under his own name after his death, the text still refers to his wife as “H” (her seldom used first name was Helen). The book is compiled from the four notebooks used by Lewis to vent and explore his grief. He illustrates the everyday trials of life without Joy and explores fundamental questions of faith and theodicy. Lewis' stepson (Joy's son) Douglas Gresham pointed out in his 1994 introduction that the indefinite article 'a' in the title makes it clear that Lewis' grief is not the quintessential experience of the loss of a loved one but just one individual's perspective among countless others. The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie, '' Shadowlands'', as well as a 1993 film of th ...
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Faber And Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Founded in 1929, in 2006 the company was named the KPMG Publisher of the Year. Faber and Faber Inc., formerly the American branch of the London company, was sold in 1998 to the Holtzbrinck company Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). Faber and Faber ended the partnership with FSG in 2015 and began distributing its books directly in the United States. History Faber and Faber began as a firm in 1929, but originates in the Scientific Press, owned by Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer. The Scientific Press derived much of its income from the weekly magazine ''The Nursing Mirror.'' The Gwyers' desire to expand into trade publishing led them to Geoffrey Fab ...
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Joy Davidman
Helen Joy Davidman (18 April 1915 – 13 July 1960) was an American poet and writer. Often referred to as a child prodigy, she earned a master's degree from Columbia University in English literature at age twenty in 1935. For her book of poems, ''Letter to a Comrade'', she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award for Poetry in 1939. She was the author of several books, including two novels. While an atheist and after becoming a member of the American Communist Party, she met and married her first husband and father of her two sons, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1942. After a troubled marriage, and following her conversion to Christianity, they divorced and she left America to travel to England with her sons. Davidman published her best-known work, ''Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments,'' in 1954 with a preface by C. S. Lewis. Lewis influenced her work and conversion and became her second husband after ...
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Theodicy
Theodicy () means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the problem of evil "to make the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good or omnibenevolent God consistent with the existence of evil or suffering in the world". Unlike a defense, which tries to demonstrate that God's existence is logically possible in the light of evil, a theodicy provides a framework wherein God's existence is also plausible. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in 1710 in his work , though various responses to the problem of evil had been previously proposed. The British philosopher John Hick traced the history of moral theodicy in his 1966 work, ''Evil and the God of Love'', identifying three major traditions: # the Plotinian theodicy, named after Plotinus # the Augustinian theodicy, which Hick base ...
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Douglas Gresham
Douglas Howard Gresham (born November 10, 1945) is an American British stage and voice-over actor, biographer, film producer, and executive record producer. He is one of the two stepsons of C. S. Lewis. Early life Gresham was born in New York City, the son of writers William Lindsay Gresham and Joy Davidman. William Gresham was the author of '' Nightmare Alley'', the classic of American noir literature, while Joy Davidman was best known for her book ''Smoke on the Mountain'', about the Ten Commandments. The couple were separated in 1954, and Joy moved to England with her two sons.Sibley (1985), pp. 108–12. His mother was of Jewish descent. C. S. Lewis Gresham's mother had become friends with C. S. Lewis through correspondence, and the friendship blossomed, eventually leading to marriage in 1956. Gresham's mother died of cancer in 1960, and Lewis continued to raise Douglas and his elder brother David. (Lewis had adopted the boys when he married, and ''The Horse and Hi ...
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Shadowlands (1985 Film)
''Shadowlands'', also known as ''C.S. Lewis: Shadowlands'' and ''C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands'', is a 1985 television film written by William Nicholson, directed by Norman Stone and produced by David M. Thompson for BBC Wales. The film is about the relationship between Oxford don and author C. S. Lewis and the American writer Joy Davidman. It stars Joss Ackland as Lewis, with Claire Bloom as his wife Joy Davidman. Synopsis Oxford professor, world-renowned writer and confirmed bachelor C.S. Lewis (Joss Ackland) finds himself famed and admired from the success of his recently published series of Narnia books for children. One day, Lewis receives a captivating letter from an American woman, New York divorcée: Joy Gresham (Claire Bloom). A mother of two boys, Gresham strikes up a correspondence with Lewis, who over time finds himself falling in love with the writer. Gresham moves to England with her two boys, Douglas and David (Rupert Baderman, Rhys Hopkins), and marries Le ...
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Shadowlands (1993 Film)
''Shadowlands'' is a 1993 British biographical drama film about the relationship between academic C. S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) and Jewish American poet Joy Davidman (played by Debra Winger), her death from cancer, and how this challenged his Christianity. It was directed by Richard Attenborough with a screenplay by William Nicholson based on his 1985 television film and 1989 stage play of the same name. The 1985 script began life as ''I Call It Joy'' written for Thames Television by Brian Sibley and Norman Stone. Sibley later wrote the book, ''Shadowlands: The True Story of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman''. The film won the 1993 BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film. The film marked the last film appearance of English actor Michael Denison. Plot In the 1950s, the reserved, middle-aged bachelor C. S. Lewis is an Oxford University academic at Magdalen College and author of ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' series of children's books. He meets the married American poet J ...
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Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L'Engle DStJ (; November 29, 1918 – September 6, 2007) was an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult fiction, including ''A Wrinkle in Time'' and its sequels: ''A Wind in the Door'', ''A Swiftly Tilting Planet'', ''Many Waters'', and ''An Acceptable Time''. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science. Early life Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918, and named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine Margaret L'Engle, otherwise known as Mado. Her maternal grandfather was Florida banker Bion Barnett, co-founder of Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother, a pianist, was also named Madeleine: Madeleine Hall Barnett. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent who, according to his daughter, suffered lung damage from mustard gas during World War I. L'Engle wrote her first story at age of five and began keeping a journal at age ...
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The Problem Of Pain
''The Problem of Pain'' is a 1940 book on the problem of evil by C. S. Lewis, in which Lewis argues that human pain, animal pain, and hell are not sufficient reasons to reject belief in a good and powerful God. Lewis states that his writing is "not ''primarily'' arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origin - a task ... necessary if we are to put the problem of pain in its right setting". He begins by addressing the flaws in common arguments against the belief in a just, loving, and all-powerful God such as: "If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." Topics include human suffering and sinfulness, animal suffering, and the problem of hell, and seeks to reconcile these with an omnipotent force beyond ourselves. Summary Introduction Lewis starts with his former atheistic stance and pai ...
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1961 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 3 ** United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces that the United States has severed diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba (Cuba–United States relations are restored in 2015). ** Aero Flight 311 (Koivulahti air disaster): Douglas DC-3C OH-LCC of Finnish airline Aero crashes near Kvevlax (Koivulahti), on approach to Vaasa Airport in Finland, killing all 25 on board, due to pilot error: an investigation finds that the captain and first officer were both exhausted for lack of sleep, and had consumed excessive amounts of alcohol at the time of the crash. It remains the deadliest air disaster to occur in the country. * January 5 ** Italian sculptor Alfredo Fioravanti marches into the U.S. Consulate in Rome, and confesses that he was part of the team that forged the Etruscan terracotta warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ** After the 1960 military coup, General Cemal Gürsel forms the new government of Turkey (25th government). * ...
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Books By C
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called ...
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Irish Non-fiction Books
Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ** Republic of Ireland, a sovereign state * Irish language, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family spoken in Ireland * Irish people, people of Irish ethnicity, people born in Ireland and people who hold Irish citizenship Places * Irish Creek (Kansas), a stream in Kansas * Irish Creek (South Dakota), a stream in South Dakota * Irish Lake, Watonwan County, Minnesota * Irish Sea, the body of water which separates the islands of Ireland and Great Britain People * Irish (surname), a list of people * William Irish, pseudonym of American writer Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) * Irish Bob Murphy, Irish-American boxer Edwin Lee Conarty (1922–1961) * Irish McCal ...
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Philosophy Books
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some sources claim the term was coined by Pythagoras ( BCE), although this theory is disputed by some. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. in . Historically, ''philosophy'' encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a ''philosopher''."The English word "philosophy" is first attested to , meaning "knowledge, body of knowledge." "natural philosophy," which began as a discipline in ancient India and Ancient Greece, encompasses astronomy, medicine, and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 ''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'' later became classified as a book of physics. In the 19th century, the growth of modern University, researc ...
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