Word: joads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dapple-bearded little Philosopher C. E. M. Joad, 56, of the University of London, is familiar to British radio listeners as the wittily bumptious know-it-all of Brains Trust (BBC's recently ended version of Information Please). To bookish laymen and lecture-goers he is known as a racy popularizer of philosophy ("Philosophy should be about something that matters"). Clergymen once knew him as an annoying, church-baiting agnostic; at least one angry sermon has been preached on "God, Joad and the Devil...
Readers of Joad's fast-selling latest book are now discovering the new Joad who emerged during the war a believer. Joad's Decadence, A Philosophical Inquiry (Faber; 12/6), adds up to an easy-reading defense of Christian belief ("less implausible than any other theory of the universe with which I am acquainted...
...agnostic days Joad used to be fond of saying: "When the mind becomes old and begins to decay, it becomes matted with God-webs." Joad's own mind grew God-webby as World War II grew more terrible. He began to doubt that evil was something that could be cured by socialism, progressive schools and psychoanalysis. He now says with a grin: "In that view, a world of adequately psychoanalyzed Communists would be the millennium...
Having returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood, Believer Joad worships regularly at his parish church in Hampstead or at the church near his Hampshire country place. But he has lost none of his saucy skill at dialectic. He explained last week: "When war came, the existence of evil hit me in the face. . . . Human progress is possible, but so unlikely. People don't know how to conceive it." Wrote Pessimist Joad shortly after the end of the war: "I see now that evil is endemic in man, and that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses...
Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, bearded by the press and attempting an explanation of British tolerance of demi-bared bosoms in the cinema: "Perhaps it is because we have a longer past. We know that often in our history women have worn low-cut dresses, and it doesn't shock us that Jane Russell looks more like a woman than any woman ought to look...