Month: March 2021

On This Day Forty Years Ago

It was forty years ago today, and I remember it well. I was working at a radio station in Norfolk, Virginia, and part of my task was to read the news. The news that day was rather shocking. As President Reagan walked out of the Washington Hilton, gunman John Hinckley waited in the crowd. Shots were fired; a scramble was on to grab the assailant and protect the president. No one knew at the time that Reagan had been hit…. Read more »

We Shall Get In

I concluded my class, “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity,” this past Monday evening. In the previous session, we looked at Lewis’s poignant thoughts after the death of his wife, Joy, in A Grief Observed. As significant as that reading is—and it affects many people deeply—I didn’t want to end the class on that note. I preferred that we finish with a joyful glimpse into the essence of the Christian life and the hope of eternity. For that… Read more »

Reversing the Faith of an Adult Lifetime

Over the years, I’ve taught my “Witness of Whittaker Chambers” course many times. It never gets old or stale; in fact, each time I sense that the Lord uses it to help me see even more of His mercy and grace. The life of Whittaker Chambers exemplifies God’s grace while simultaneously challenging readers of his masterful autobiography, Witness, to seek ever more earnestly the face of God. In teaching the course this semester, the depth of Chambers’s personal path and… Read more »

Observing a Grief

This past week in my “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity” class at church, I and the other 35 participants who joined me either in person or via Zoom, immersed ourselves in Lewis’s painfully personal account of how he reacted to the death of his wife, Joy. What began as some jottings—almost stream-of-consciousness writing—in a notebook eventually did find its way into print as A Grief Observed. Some find this little book disconcerting because it reveals the struggle… Read more »

When Subversion Is a Good Thing, Shocking as That May Seem

Dorothy L. Sayers was a “find” for me in just the last few years. Once I realized she and C. S. Lewis were friends and that he loved her BBC radio plays titled The Man Born to Be King, I knew I had to be better acquainted with her writings. I read all of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, luxuriated in The Mind of the Maker, devoted myself to the book version of the radio plays (with her marvelous introduction),… Read more »