New Book Cover and Title

Here is my new book cover, with a revised title: Mere Culture, after C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

Here is some background on Lewis' title:

- Communicating "Mere Christianity"
From the C. S. Lewis Institute:

For I am not writing to expound something I could call ‘my religion,’ but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not…So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters written to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or ‘mere’ Christianity

- The Whos and Whats of "Mere Christianity"
By William Griffin:

The words “Mere Christianity” weren’t original to Lewis. In the seventeenth century Richard Baxter, an Anglican divine with Puritan predilections, used the words “Mere Christianity” in his book The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. The work was something like the sixteenth-century Spaniard Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in that it prepared the soul, through a series of measured steps, for its heavenly home. The first ten chapters described Heaven, who’ll be there and who won’t, and why one must pursue Heaven strenuously while on earth. The last six chapters prescribed the Anglican method, with Puritan overlay, of pursuing the heavenly, and indeed heavily contemplative, life.

- From the preface of C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:

I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else.

It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals.

The photograph on the book cover is one I took of the old head office of the Canadian Bank of Commerce (now known as the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce - CIBC) on King Street, in Toronto's financial district.

Here is a blog I posted on the photo(s) and the building last summer, which I titled Gilded Ceiling. There is a slide show of more photos I took of the interior at my photography blog.

Fund Raising Auction and Edith Hamilton's Mythology

Edith Hamilton's portrait
in the Bryn Mawr lilbrary
By Lydia Field Emmet

I cannot find the date of the painting,
but Emmet painted mostly 1900 and 1920,
so I would place this portrait in that period

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I've been doing some moving recently, and somehow misplaced my Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. I went and bought another copy, before I found the original at the bottom of a suitcase.

I've been doing some fundraising drives, mainly to help me with my book project.

I will send this copy of Hamilton's concise, useful and interesting book on Greek and Roman mythology (with a final section on Norse mythology) to the highest donor in my second fundraising drive.

Hamilton's book was the small guide I used when I recently maneuvered through the Royal Ontario Museum's Greek and Roman sections.

Book Project

Camera Lucida: Views on Art
Culture and Society

By Kidist Paulos Asrat

Things are more urgent than they seem. While looking for a portrait of Hamilton, I came across the image below of "students studying" in the library named after her, and which has her portrait on the wall.

Hamilton would have been deeply saddened that young girls, in sloppy clothing, "read" books lounging on the seats with their shoddily shod feet sullying the library tables. A closer inspection of the photo shows that they are using the library as a lounge to rummage through their class notes rather than a place to read books. I suspect there is a lot of "notes sharing" going on, with full blown discussions. That is why I no longer use libraries, public or university. They have become gossipy social hubs rather than study centers.