Reflections on God … Man … Life
C. S. Lewis was just as human as the rest of us. Perhaps some of us have a tendency to think that such a great thinker, writer, and teacher—and who was famous enough to merit being the subject of a Time magazine cover—wouldn’t have too many “bumps” in his life or become weary of well-doing. Not true. That magazine cover is from 1947. By that time, he had become a household name in Britain due to his BBC broadcasts during… Read more »
I have never been at such odds with American culture. That’s fine, if being at odds means I’m remaining faithful to Biblical standards of morality. But there is a price to pay for being faithful. Some Christians are experiencing legal nightmares due to their stance. That hasn’t happened to me yet, but everyone who refuses to bow to the new immorality will receive criticism, sometimes harsh criticism, in some way. For instance, try saying something like this publicly and see… Read more »
“In a sense,” C. S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, “the central story of my life is about nothing else.” What was that “nothing else”? He continued, “It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Now he comes to the point: “I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.” I presume that most people today would not see any… Read more »
This current generation of voters knows Joe Biden only as Obama’s VP. I’ve been around a lot longer than your average voter (how startling to say that now) and I’ve “known” Joe Biden from the 1980s up to the present. He hasn’t changed with respect to his character: practiced smile while eviscerating a foe (cue the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings); plagiarist without equal (which led to the demise of one of his presidential runs); teller of tall tales…. Read more »
“What does not satisfy when we find it,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “was not the thing we were desiring.” That short statement came in the middle of his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and it summarizes the whole point of the book, wherein the protagonist comes back to the Christian faith that he didn’t desire at the outset of his journey: he finally realizes that what he was running away from was the real thing after all. The book… Read more »
June 6–the 75th anniversary of Operation Overlord, better known as D-Day–the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. I do my best in my American history survey course to impress on the students the sacrifices made that day. The current generation has so little sense of history and the impact it still makes on us now. My duty as a professor is to help them see that connection. They have freedom, but it has been bought at a… Read more »
“It seems to me impossible to retain in any recognisable form our belief in the Divinity of Christ and the truth of the Christian revelation,” C. S. Lewis remarked, “while abandoning, or even persistently neglecting, the promised, and threatened, Return.” The world likes Christ’s first coming, His nativity, because we get presents and feel-good Hallmark movies—you know, that amorphous “Christmas spirit” that is bereft of the Christ of Christmas. The Second Coming concept, though, as Lewis notes, is, for some,… Read more »