Teaching Narnia

I’m now a member of a church that has a strong education program. On Wednesday evenings, for an hour and a half each week, I’ve had the joy of teaching C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity (along with my book, America Discovers C. S. Lewis). I’ve now been asked—and have readily agreed—to teach The Chronicles of Narnia. I won’t try to cram them all into one semester; instead, I’ll divide them into a two-semester format, covering the… Read more »

When Rule of Law Prevails

The release of the Mueller Report has had the predicted result: very few partisans have been convinced to set aside their preconceived notions about either the guilt or innocence of Donald Trump with respect to contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign or his actions to obstruct justice in the investigation. What is most dismaying to me, though, is that partisans for Trump have rarely looked at key sections of the Mueller Report. Some won’t because they consider Mueller to… Read more »

A False Image of God

What is your image of God? What is mine? I think there are two false images (well, probably a lot more) that are opposites: the “good buddy” who is there to be my co-pilot (in which case He is only along for the ride—we still call the shots) or the far-away, unapproachable Being that is so very different from us that we can never understand Him. I’ll save that first false image for another time, perhaps, and focus today on… Read more »

My Political Wilderness (Part 2)

In my last post, I made it clear that I don’t have a home in the Democrat party. The extremism that dominates that party makes it an unwelcome place for those, like me, who believe abortion is wrong, that same-sex marriage is unacceptable, and that big-government socialism is not the proper path to follow for policy. All of those positions are anathema to me because of my basic Christian presuppositions. So my obvious political home should be the Republican party,… Read more »

My Political Wilderness (Part 1)

Way back in the Dark Ages of my life, I thought I was a Democrat. I was raised to think—not ideologically, but culturally—that all the good common people were Democrats. I wasn’t taught this specifically; it was simply my cultural environment. JFK was the charismatic rerun of Camelot; LBJ was the champion of the poor and the downtrodden. How could I not be a Democrat? Going to college, though, turned me toward Republicans. That was certainly counter-cultural during my years… Read more »

The Source of True Humility

C. S. Lewis had a way of taking a concept and giving it new life, sometimes simply by illustration, other times by making sure we have the correct definition of that concept. Take humility, for instance. To the world at large, the word conjures up an image of weakness or some kind of constant self-belittling. Yet humility is actually a source of spiritual strength; neither does it mean one has no value. That’s never true in God’s eyes. Here’s how… Read more »

Radio Days: A Retrospective (Part 2)

Yesterday, I talked about some lessons I learned while working as a radio announcer right after college. One lesson I left for today. It has to do with dealing with people. Although I didn’t have a call-in program, there were some individuals who had the phone number for the radio station because they had been calling announcers there for a number of years to request certain songs be played. I inherited that tradition. The problem was that I was introducing… Read more »