The current President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, ought to be THROWN on the mercy of a World Court.

Donald Gardner Stacy

Professor Joseph Romm, with a PhD from MIT no less, has presented a thorough-going case for the “responsible involvement” of The United States in climate-warming treaty negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009. He does not mince words when he points out repeatedly in a number of ways just how dire this problem of global warming has become.

Yet he asserts, as shown in the following quotation from his essay, that sufficient political support from American Conservatives in Congress should not be expected: “Since conservatives can ensure there is no U.S.-ratified treaty, Obama must pursue a different strategy, a high-leverage approach focusing on the world's major emitters.”

Now, here is a good example of a scientist (and as we all know, in their personal lives, scientists tend to be notoriously impractical people; my father was an organic chemist, so I should know); and for a scientist to make the unspoken assumption that he has a working knowlege of the by-ways of Congress, doesn’t quite cut the mustard in my book.

The tack (or line of diplomatic attack) which he proposes that Obama follow is, of course, necessary. This approach will be necessary even if the Conservatives in Congress come to support the Copenhagen treaty, whatever this treaty might contain in the way of international and binding laws. And furthermore, he appears as though he actually believes that it would be useless to attempt to “convert,” shall we say, convert the Republicans into a political posture from which these lawmakers not only acknowledge the problem of global warming with the same conviction and the same perceptions of it which now inform Professor Romm’s thinking on the matter, but actually vote in sensible accordance with, for them, these newly discovered perceptions.

With a still later breath, Professor then asserts: “If Obama wants to be a great president, he will not merely have to put this country on a sustainable path; he will have to help bring China and the whole world onto that path too.” And of course I’m in complete agreement with this particular, rather inclusive sentiment. . . . But we should not forget that the more conservative members of the American Republican Party are also members of the whole world, just as any of us are members of this place called Earth which is indeed already in the slow yet accelerating process of losing its land-mass to the sea.

Donald Gardner Stacy

C.S. Lewis, while still alive, was a professor (a don, as they call them at Oxford or Cambridge in London) of literature and perhaps philosophy. As an Englishman, he had no doubt been brought up by attending The Church of England, it's closest off-shoot in the United States being the Episcopalean Church.

How Lewis's theology developed and matured is not my concern. My affection for fantasy and science fiction ended when I was about 16 years old and purchased my first paperback copy of a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, "The Waltz Invention," which sounded vaguely science-fictional at the time---which is the reason I bought it.

"The Gormenghast Trilogy" was another epic fantasy tale which I actually did read in my youth. There may have been symbolic references to Christianity in that literary work, just as there are surely many in the work of C.S. Lewis.

One of the British professor's works I did read as a required text at Washington State University was "The Abolition of Man," a book-length essay about the diminishment of the individual in the face of a totalitarian system of government. This book by Lewis I have read perhaps three times; it is well-worth anyone's sustained attention who is at all interested in the problem of human development.

William Blake was a master at depicting his own Imagination, both in poetry and in lithographs which he made himself using a system of copper plates and acid baths. For Blake, as for Lewis, the human imagination was a form of Heaven, quite literarlly a form of Heaven.