Arnold Lunn

Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn (18 April 1888 – 2 June 1974) was a skier, mountaineer and writer.

His father was a lay Methodist minister, but Lunn was an agnostic and wrote critically about Catholicism before he converted to that religion at the age of 45 and became an apologist.

[3] By 1922, however, Lunn, convinced that there was a real need for a race designed to test a skier's ability to turn securely and rapidly on steep Alpine ground,[4] was insisting on speed being the only arbiter.

"[6] Lunn refereed the slalom in the 1936 Winter Olympics, and his son, Peter, was the captain of the British ski team, but neither marched in the opening procession or attended the lavish banquet organised by the Nazis.

A double-black diamond trail at Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico is named for Sir Arnold Lunn.

As a result, when he read Leslie Stephen's An Agnostic's Apology, "I found myself defenceless – thanks to the miserable deficiency of Anglican education – against his onslaughts."

In 1924 he published Roman Converts, which consisted of highly critical studies of five eminent converts to Roman Catholicism: John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, George Tyrell, Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Ronald Knox.

In 1930 Lunn published The Flight from Reason, in which he argued that scientific materialism is finally a philosophy of nihilism: it ends by questioning the very basis of its own existence.

They are, therefore, determined by irrational processes, and the thoughts which lead to the conclusion that materialism is true have no basis in reason.

During the Spanish Civil War, Lunn became a dedicated supporter of the Nationalist side; he wrote many anti-Republican articles for the British press, and was a member of the pro-Franco group Friends of National Spain.

In commending Mitchell’s well-informed analysis, Orwell savaged Spanish Rehearsal, in particular disputing that the burning of nuns was now commonplace in "red Spain".

Her husband wrote: "In the aristocracy of Mürren she welcomed this modest reminder of the fact that inventing the Slalom was not the only Lunn claim to respect."

"Mabel," Lunn wrote, "was invincibly English and I was much consoled during the dark days of 1940 by the fact that her confidence in final victory was never shaken."

As his wife had made up her mind, all that remained was for Lunn to demonstrate his "manly independence by a formal interview before engaging her candidate for the job."

Phyllis, who was an agnostic and very familiar with modern attacks on Christianity, confidently expected that Haldane would demolish Lunn, and was "both surprised and annoyed" by his inability to do so.

Her first reaction was to find fault with Haldane as a controversialist and to be "unduly complimentary" about Lunn's controversial talents.

Gradually, however, she began to suspect that it was the weakness of Haldane's case which enabled Lunn to get the better of his "intellectual superior," and this was the first step in her return to the Christian faith.

[citation needed] Not long before his first wife died, Lunn wrote, she "confided to a friend that if anything ever happened to her, Phyllis would take me on, and few second marriages have been so warmly welcomed by the husband's children and friends, and for less obvious reasons by the husband's hostesses.