C. S. Lewis’s Most Important Message: The Abolition of Man as Lewis’s Self-conscious Struggle for the Value of Human Persons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the roughly sixty years since C. S. Lewis’s death, many have asked, what was the message he most wanted to convey? A decade before Lewis’s passing, Dr. James Houston asked him that very question. Lewis answered that he was fighting “reductionism.” More specifically, Houston heard C. S. Lewis to be most concerned about reduction of the value of the human person. At the time of this writing, Houston is 101 years of age, and he has kept a low profile all these years about his relationship with C. S. Lewis. From 1947 until 1954, he and Lewis were more than just passing acquaintances. In fact, Houston’s reputation as a friend of Lewis reached North America. He recalls that several American Christian scholars, including Carl Henry, Frank Gaebelien, and Clyde Kilby, asked him to introduce them to Lewis. His story is an example of those who, though lesser known to date by most Lewis researchers, had significant interactions with Lewis. Houston is the founder of Regent College in Vancouver, B. C., a graduate school in Christian studies. He is also co-founder of the C. S. Lewis Institute that started in Washington D.C. He sat for an oral history interview conducted on 2 October 2017 at his home in Vancouver, Canada, agreeing to put down his memories of Lewis for the historical record. The interview is now available at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Houston realizes public discussions of his memories of Lewis have been rare. In fact, the only other time he made a thorough statement of their years long association was during a talk given at the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society in 1982. 1 Still, he believes his experiences with Lewis are not only an important chapter of his own life, but valuable enough to get on the historical record as they will lead to new insights. Some environments where James Houston encountered C. S. Lewis have either not been reported by others who knew Lewis, or they were private encounters between Lewis and Houston.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".