Mere Christianity; A revised and enlarged edition, with a new introduction, of The Case for Christianity, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality
New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, [1997]. Later edition. Octavo, original orange cloth, gilt spine, original dust jacket. About Fine. Item #1654
"ADDRESSED TO YOU, AS A FELLOW MORTAL"
Later edition of Mere Christianity—bringing together C.S. Lewis’s wartime radio addresses—a landmark of popular Christian apologetics. First published in 1952 by Geoffrey Bles (Great Britain) and Macmillan (United States), this is essentially an Anniversary Edition of the first American edition. Complete with the dust jacket designed for this edition by Jeheber and Pearce.
Mere Christianity was adapted from a series of BBC Broadcast Talks given by Lewis during the convulsive years of the Second World War: "People whose lives had been torn apart by war and suffering, who needed something to cling to, devoured his series of popular theological books, tuned into his broadcasts, flocked at every opportunity to hear him speak" (John Wain). Mere Christianity collects in a single volume the revised and expanded transcripts of the BBC radio talks that appeared separately in print as: Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944).
"His aim was to express, in five fifteen-minute talks, the lineaments of the classical Christian worldview, or, as he would later call it, after the seventeenth-century English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, ‘mere Christianity’— mere that is, in the older sense of the word, meaning pure, unvarnished, and undistorted by sectarian bias" (Zaleski and Zaleski). Composed of four sections: Book I. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe, Book II. What Christians Believe, Book III. Christian Behaviour, Book IV. Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity. Lewis's appealing conversational style, from one layman to another, is established in the introductory Preface, "deploying, to great effect, the telling analogy and didactic exemplum, often introduced as a 'supposal'" (Zaleski and Zaleski). Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings.
Price: $75.00