Sublime

his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.

And the third crisis, through which we’re living? That, Professor Rex argued, involves “. . . a question that would once have been expressed as ‘What is man?’ The fact that this wording is now itself seen as problematic is a symptom of the very condition it seeks to diagnose. What is it, in other words, to be human?” That, Rex rightly contends, is

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier