Mere Christianity: Teaching a Classic

  

C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity has become a classic in the history of books explaining the Christian faith. I have begun teaching this classic at my church on Wednesday evenings. People can come in person, watch on Zoom, or watch the sessions later after the video is uploaded. The interest is high: 60 have now participated in the first session and others will undoubtedly let me know later that they have watched the first video. It’s a blessing to have this… Read more »

The Lewis Model for Our Culture

  

The task before us as Christians is how to navigate in a culture that is either opposed to God’s truths or indifferent to them. The first is open hostility; the second is apathy. Sometimes, when facing the hostile part of the culture, we tend to become “culture warriors,” using the world’s weapons in our battle against that hostility. To do so is to undermine our Christian witness. We don’t win anyone over to the truth by acting in an unchristian… Read more »

Being Christian in a Non-Christian Culture

  

I’m currently teaching a course at my church that I’ve titled “Being Christian in a Non-Christian Culture.” I laid out five questions at the beginning of the course to show what I hope to accomplish through this teaching. They are the following: What is the Church and what is its mission? How are Christians supposed to interact with the culture? What is the proper relationship between the Church and the State? What has happened to the Christian witness to the… Read more »

A Two-Year Publishing Anniversary

  

Two years ago this month, this book took its place alongside the multitude of books about C.S. Lewis. Each author hopes to find a niche for his topic; my co-author, Jamin Metcalf, and I believed we had settled on an aspect of Lewis’s life and writings that few others had emphasized: the fact that Lewis not only was a masterful apologist for the Christian faith, a wonderfully imaginative writer of fiction, and a superb analyst in his primary field of… Read more »

A Time of Preparation

  

July and August are my months “off” from teaching, but they aren’t months off for preparation. Although I’m constantly preparing year-round, the absence of teaching during this time allows a greater concentration on what I’ll be doing over the next year. Much of it has to do with C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. Last month, I received a pleasant surprise when I was contacted by the Wade Center about an article that I had sent in a couple… Read more »

The Ultimate Agape

  

I’ve been teaching a class at church on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. We’ve worked our way through Affection, Friendship, and Eros. In each case, we’ve seen that God meant for these types of love to be blessings for mankind. They are never wrong in themselves with respect to what God intended for them. Yet, in each case, Lewis spends time showing how each of these loves can go wrong. Affection can develop a neediness that becomes quite selfish…. Read more »

True Friendship: The Least Jealous of Loves

  

To C. S. Lewis, Friendship is an obvious love, even if it seems to be unnecessary. He says Friendship has fallen by the wayside in modern times. Lewis believes the foundation of Friendship is not the avoidance of loneliness. Rather, it is the recognition of shared truth. In the Friendship chapter of The Four Loves, Lewis asserts, “Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live… Read more »