Reflections on God … Man … Life
I’ve been teaching a special class at my church on C. S. Lewis. We meet every Monday evening (both in person and on Zoom) to cover some of Lewis’s most thoughtful discourses on life, death, and eternity. My opening slide for the class revealed what we were going to read. We’ve concluded our discussion of Surprised by Joy and just this past Monday finished key chapters in The Problem of Pain. The most jarring and challenging was the chapter on… Read more »
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I do, however, conduct a daily assessment of God’s direction in my life. That, I think, should be the real resolution for all of us. Writing this blog has been a part of God’s direction for me for nearly twelve years now. The goal is the same as when I started it in 2008: dedication to Biblical principles in life, whether that be with respect to our personal relationship with Christ, commentary on the… Read more »
All of life, for a Christian, is a ministry. We are all called to different types of ministry, yet everything we do is to be done for God’s glory as we spread His truth. My ministry is teaching. I love to teach straight from Scripture, I love to teach things derived from Scripture (such as my C. S. Lewis classes), and I also love to teach in my particular field of expertise, which is American history and government. That last… Read more »
Love is such a misunderstood word. Every good thing that emanates from God can and has been perverted. Some expressions that we call love are just the opposite. C. S. Lewis gives us an excellent, and disturbing, example of this in The Great Divorce. In the fanciful tale of a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of heaven, Lewis lays bare all the roadblocks people set up that keep them from acknowledging God and His truth. One episode involves… Read more »
“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne’s question ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ is equally relevant.” We live so much in the “present” that we often neglect what we say we believe about the transitory nature of this world. We have an eternity that awaits us, yet… Read more »
As a historian, and as someone who has also taught in a master’s program of government, I am naturally attuned to the politics of our day. That doesn’t mean I love politics or am particularly enamored of the way politics manifests itself through the aggrandizement of politicians’ egos. Yet I cannot divorce myself from it because it now seems to invade every aspect of our lives. What I do like is governing, in the sense that God is interested in… Read more »
I’m teaching my C. S. Lewis course at my university again this semester. The students began their Lewis reading with Surprised by Joy, his insightful autobiography. We are now focused on Mere Christianity and discussing the significance of that book. Every time I come back to it, I’m deeply impressed all over again, and I always seem to find nuggets of truth and wisdom that stand out more clearly than in my previous reading. This time I was struck particularly… Read more »