Word: godly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Whipsnade Zoo is hardly the Road to Damascus, but it was dramatic enough for a brilliant Oxford don who traveled it one September day in 1931. As he later described his adventure: "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion...
Like Vanauken, Lewis started out an atheist-one reason his approach to religion appeals to outsiders. After years of struggle he "admitted that God was God" and knelt to pray one night, "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." At that point, two years before the Whipsnade Zoo outing, he was a theist but not yet a Christian. Prodded by friends, including a fellow Oxford don, Author (Lord of the Rings) J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis subsequently decided that the Christ story is a myth like other great myths, but with the "tremendous difference that it really happened...
Once convinced that in Jesus Christ "myth became fact," Lewis turned to convincing others. Two of his books as amateur theologian put many professionals to shame: The Problem of Pain (1940), an explanation of how a benevolent God can permit evil to exist; and Miracles (1947), a case for the plausibility of the supernatural. In The Screwtape Letters (1942), his witty little classic, Lewis has a veteran devil advise on how to ensnare souls for "Our Father below." Small sins were often best. Quoth Screwtape: "Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest...
...from mankind's inherent sense of right and wrong. Think about this, Lewis says: men feel wet when they fall into water; fish do not. If men feel "wet"-alien-in a world where evil abounds, he reasons, an unseen kingdom of Tightness must exist, and that means God. From there Lewis proceeds to explain evil via the Fall of Man and to offer Christ as the solution. In one passage Lewis rejects the "foolish" idea that Jesus was just a "great moral teacher." No, he says, this was One who claimed to forgive sins and declared that...
What happened, Flynt told TIME Chicago Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate, was that he had found God at 40,000 ft.-in a chartered jet somewhere between Denver and Houston. "It was powerful and awesome," says Flynt of the experience. "There I was, representing the pits of what is wrong in our society, and it happened. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried for God." At first, Flynt's wife Althea was also emotional over his conversion, for another reason. "The Lord may have entered your life," she told him, "but $20 million just walked...