"I Believe In The Value of plain speech," said author and poet Kathleen Norris during a recent symposium at Harvard on the writer C. S. Lewis. "I have to love any writer who says that any fool can write learned language. [Lewis said that] the vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into the vernacular, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it. [I also believe that] faith and even some of its abstract notions ... can and must be explained in accessible language and imagery, and Lewis provided us with a very fine example of that."
Ms. Norris was one of the speakers invited by Cambridge Forum to speak in the Memorial Church on the impact of Lewis's work on world culture, with a special focus on The Screwtape Letters. The others were Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
The panelists spent almost an hour answering questions from an enthusiastic audience. Here are some of the questions, with exercepts from the panelists' responses.
