Category: Book Reviews

Teaching Lewis & Sayers

  

I’m currently teaching my university course on C. S. Lewis. We have traversed the Lewis universe by reading Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and his superb sermon/essay, “Learning in War-time.” We are now deeply embroiled in the third installment of his Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Coming attractions: The Last Battle, A Grief Observed, and Lewis’s greatest—in my estimation—sermon/essay of all, “The Weight of Glory.” I wish I could have given them even more;… Read more »

The Author Who Invented Her

  

I’ve written previously about C. S. Lewis’s appreciation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s works. He was particularly enthused by her new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When he first learned she was undertaking that task, he remarked in a letter to her, “I expect I shall find you loud pedaling the comic element more than I approve, but it is much better to have your Dante as your Dante than to have a compromise between it and some one else’s. That’s… Read more »

My Lewisian 2025

  

I continue to teach as an adjunct professor at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida. This recent adjunct status after fourteen years as a full-time professor at SEU, while distressing at first (a slew of us lost our full-time positions in the wake of COVID), has offered me the grand opportunity of teaching upper-level history courses of my choice. One of those, which I have taught now ever since my academic sabbatical in 2014-2015, is my course on C. S. Lewis…. Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 3

  

This is will be my third and final look at connections I see between C. S. Lewis’s thoughts and what Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in her valuable work, The Mind of the Maker. Chapter eight is appropriately entitled “Pentecost,” as it focuses on the power of words to move men. Lewis was a dedicated wordsmith who knew that the right words used at the right time in just the right way, could spark the imagination and jumpstart the mind. Sayers… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 2

  

In a previous post, I showed how C. S. Lewis praised Dorothy L. Sayers’s book, The Mind of the Maker, and offered one example. I would like to add to that today with some similarities I see between what Lewis wrote in some of his works and what Sayers wrote in her book. Chapter three, “Idea, Energy, and Power,” develops Sayers’s thesis by showing how any completed work in life starts with an idea in the mind. This correlates nicely… Read more »

“The Mind of the Maker”: Lewis on Sayers–Part 1

  

In my last post, I showed how C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers first made a connection. I mentioned in passing his reading of her book, The Mind of the Maker. He read it shortly after it was published in 1941 and then wrote a review of it in the journal Theology. He introduces the theme immediately: “The purpose of this book is to throw light both on the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity and on the process whereby… Read more »

The Lewis-Sayers Connection—and God’s Leading

  

Dorothy Sayers was never present at an Inklings meeting. She was never considered as a member of that weekly sharing of readings and thoughts. Yet she is often seen in conjunction with the Inklings because she graduated from Oxford herself and was friends with two of its leading members: Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. Sayers knew Williams first, then initiated a correspondence with Lewis that grew over time and resulted in, first, a collegial relationship, and then a more… Read more »