Fragments from Narnia – Part Two: Daughter of Eve

leafed trees
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“[T]hen the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

Genesis 2:7

“Good evening, good evening,” said the Faun. “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?”
“My name’s Lucy,’ said she, not quite understanding him.”

C. S. LEWIS, the lion, the wtich, and the wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

Daughter of Eve

Now would be a good time to reiterate that my reflections on Narnia will not be strictly exegetical. I will not be noticing everything Lewis may have wanted me to notice, and I may be commenting on things that Lewis did not intend to imply. As long as this is done responsibly and in moderation, I think this is quite fine. I mention all of this because I want to provide a few thoughts on the passage above, which occurs at the start of the second chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is an incidental comment: Lucy did not understand what Mr. Tumnus meant by “Daughter of Eve”. I do not know if what I will say here is what Lewis intended.1 Nevertheless, I chose to highlight this because in modern times, due to belief in Darwinian evolution, society no longer considers humanity as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve; rather, we are the mere product of naturalistic mechanisms. I will argue here that this is not without consequence.

To launch instantly into a drastic example, take the comments of Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton. In a section on his website about commonly asked questions, he responds to a question asking whether he would rather save a mouse or a human being from a fire. He says: “Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant, but equal consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for different interests.” This comment is already significant enough: he does not say “in all cases” but “in almost all cases”. I am not sure whether Singer means that there would be one case where he rescues the mouse over the human, but that is not my primary focus here. Note what Singer says next; the reason that he would save the human is “not because the human being is human” because just being part of a species “isn’t morally significant”.

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Fragments from Narnia – Part One: Welcome to the Wardrobe

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

jAMES 1:17

“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.”

C. S. Lewis to his goddaughter

Articles in this Series

As the heading suggests, this little expandable bubble contains all the articles in this series.

Part One: Welcome to the Wardrobe

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: 2: Daughter of Eve, 3: The Bad Faun, 4: Service under the White Witch, 5: Always Winter and Never Christmas, 6: On Grace and Truth, 7: After Darkness, Light, 8: The War Against Children, 9: Of Fauns and Forgiveness, 10: Truth and Spite, 11: Just Like a Girl , 12: The Ambiguity of Evil, 13: On the Fear of Doors, others WIP

Prince Caspian: WIP

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: WIP

The Silver Chair: WIP

The Horse and His Boy: WIP

The Magician’s Nephew: WIP

The Last Battle: WIP

A Few Words Before the Wardrobe

Firstly, before I explain what this series is about, I want to make it very clear what it is not. I am not primarily aiming at a literary analysis of Lewis’ work, though this may augment my goal. Neither do I seek to relate Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series to his broader canon, for I have yet to read all of his books. I am the furthest thing from an expert on Lewis; other books will serve a biographical and literary purpose. This wonderful tool called technology will undoubtedly point you towards those. I will probably read a few books on Lewis as I write this series, so please bear with the differing quality.

Secondly, what I aim to do in this series is to provide theological and philosophical reflections on Lewis’ work. The approach will be simple: I will go through Lewis’ series in the order in which the books were published, and for each book, I will plod through, passage by passage, book by book. The book names in the above section will not be mentioned explicitly in article titles; they may nevertheless serve as a useful marker. The passages are somewhat arbitrarily chosen insofar as they were the passages highlighted by me on my Kindle. I will not be providing a sentence-by-sentence commentary on Lewis the same way theologians comment on books of the Bible as it would be far too laborious of a task and also ignore the fact that Lewis himself did not intend for his Narnia chronicles to have a one-to-one correspondence to Biblical Christianity. Each article will deal with one passage, and the time between articles will hopefully be weekly at the very most. Also, each article will probably be shorter and more readable than my usual input. One hopes, at least.

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Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

Barbie doll, blond beauty toy

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

John 1:4

Articles in this Series

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

Feminism

In this section, I aim at a twofold goal: to provide commentary on the opening scene of the Barbie Movie, thereby leading to a discussion of demeaning children and abortion, and to present a Biblical case for the role of men and women.

The trailer or first scene of the movie begins with a landscape shot, shifting to depicting little girls playing with dolls and prams. The girls sit on a barren, rocky landscape. “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls.” says the narrator dramatically. Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, a symphonic poem named after Nietzsche’s nihilistic philosophical work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, begins to play and continues in the background. The narrator continues: “But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls until…”. The music crescendos. A giant Barbie dressed in a black-and-white swimsuit appears. She lowers her sunglasses, smiles at the girls, and winks. The next shot immediately depicts a girl shattering a doll with a different doll. Another doll is thrown into the air.1

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Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Polaroid Barbie camera (camera)

“And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years,”

-Revelation 20:2

Articles in this Series

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I had the unfortunate time watching the Barbie Movie in cinemas. It was an experience roughly analogous to having a wet cat dragged slowly over the nape of your neck, given that the cat was also brandishing its claws. However, in writing this review (mainly consisting of theological and philosophical reflection), I do not seek to lament or explore the psychological intricacies of this feline sensation. I fully recognise that in writing a review for a movie as especially pink, vibrant, and tongue-in-cheek as this one, I risk the labels of “Puritanical”, “bigot”, “fun-hater”, or other fallacious bullets contained in the liberal barrage. I will gladly accept the first: the Puritans were excellent theologians. I will deny the second and third while simultaneously wondering if those who utilise these terms have taken an elementary class in informal logical fallacies.

In the first section, I will briefly summarise of the plot of the movie (from my memory, so incomplete and perhaps inaccurate) and hopefully not risk the breach of any copyright laws. In the second section, I will seek to provide a theological framework from which we ought to approach our viewing of media.

The third and fourth sections will be in the next article. In the third section, I will critique the feminism permeating the Barbie movie, showing how it is perhaps more nuanced than expected, and provide some Biblical teaching against feminism. In the fourth section, I will evaluate the existentialism in the movie and provide the only alternative, namely the Biblical alternative. The conclusion, as the name suggests, will conclude. Let us proceed.

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