“As to the ‘state of the world’ if we have time to hope and fear about it, we certainly have time to pray. I agree it is very hard to keep one’s eyes on God amid all the daily claims and problems. I think it wise, if possible, to move one’s main prayers from the last-thing-at-night position to some earlier time: give them a better chance to infiltrate one’s other thoughts.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 253

“But don’t send me any newspaper cuttings. I never believe a word said in the papers. The real history of a period (as we always discover a few years later) has very little to do with all that, and private people like you and me are never allowed to know it while it is going on.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 252

When asked the question, “will we recognize our loved one’s in heaven?”

“The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 247

“All that Calvinist question – Free-Will & Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the face of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. ”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 237

“Your question about old friendships where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends very much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship… [is you] turn from the demand to be loved to the wish to love. Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much love one should spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crow’ is a bad sign.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 237

“I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I should suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it… Whether one should use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words or own wordless prayer, or in what proportion one should mix all three, seems to me entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience. I myself find prayers without words the best, when I can manage it, but I can do so only when least distracted and in best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 237

$cleansed = preg_replace(“/[^a-zA-Z0-9?!.,\s]/”, “”, $input);

Allows just basic sentence structure input – a to z, numbers, and a couple basic grammar marks.

“Confession can easily turn into showing off one’s wickedness.”
- Peter Hitchens (via douglaswils.com)

“Does anyone in America understand American politics? [...] I thought I was going to learn something from an old lady in Connecticut the other day, but… all I could gather was that the ‘Dumbocrats’ as she called them, are a sort of mixture of Hitler, the Russian secret police, and the inmates of the village lunatic asylum: but no doubt this view is a little prejudiced.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 220

“Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitably humility. But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.’s) where the Blessed Virgin Mary is treated really as a deity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think that such salutes are better avoided.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume 3, page 209