Rod Dreher wants you to know he's like C. S. Lewis

He does this in a recent post by plucking a quote from the first review of his Dante book by the Englewood Review of Books. But here's what makes this particular act of self-pleasuring by Rod interesting.

Unlike his usual, merely bolded UPDATEs, in this one he adds an extra H3 HTML tag to boost the size of the font even further.

Here is how that looks with the caret marks ( < > ) of normal code replaced by square brackets ( [ ] ) so that you can see the actual coding from the page:

[h3][strong]UPDATE:[/strong] [a href="http://erb.kingdomnow.org/rod-dreher-how-dante-can-save-your-life-feature-review/"]The Englewood Review of Books considers [em]How Dante. [/em][/a]Excerpt:[/h3]

 Why the extra self-attention? To highlight this gem:

If as a moral and spiritual writer Dreher is not yet the equal of, say, C. S. Lewis, parts of this book are as profound and moving as Lewis’s own memoir A Grief Observed. No mean feat, that.

Who knew? Our Rod Dreher cruising at C. S. Lewis altitudes of greatness?

Commenter DS sticks a fork in this flatulence:

C.S. Lewis comparisons? Perhaps I need to find a less distinguished blogger. Air getting all thin up in here.

Sorry, Rod. If you have to lard on H3 tags to draw attention to comparisons of yourself to C. S. Lewis, you're not anywhere close to being in Lewis' league, you're just another self-promoting south Louisiana religious hustler with megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur.

The Great Rival to Christianity

My friend Bubba wrote the following to me in an email in June of 2013.

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis points out that, for everything but the love of God, any love that becomes a small-d deity immediately becomes a demon. Any ideology can become an idol, but I honestly think the Left's ideology is an intrinsic rival to Christianity. It's not just that some Leftists go overboard, it's that Leftism requires them to worship at its altar.

Man's two greatest needs is radical change and a sense of belonging. Christ offers both, through regeneration by His Spirit and adoption into His family. Leftism presumes to offer both as well: we know that the world's not right, and the Left offers utopia through revolution, and we know we don't belong, and the Left offers a sense of belonging through the State.

Christianity and Leftism are rival religions, with competing solutions to man's most fundamental needs.

Smart guy, that Bubba, and a devout Christian.