Category: Book Reviews

The New Path

  

When my university gave me a sabbatical year for research and writing in 2014-2015, I had some of the best plans laid out that a man could devise. In tandem with a religion professor, we were going to write a book on spiritual advisors to presidents. Eagerly, I lined up trips to presidential libraries, starting with Reagan and Nixon in California, then in an order I don’t recall exactly, ultimately visiting libraries for Eisenhower, Johnson, Clinton, and the first George… Read more »

Honoring Sayers

  

“She was the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan-letter,” C.S. Lewis noted about Dorothy L. Sayers. “I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation—as I like a high wind.” I love the way Lewis described his relationship with Sayers. As a man who enjoyed long walks in the countryside, Lewis would undoubtedly appreciate a bracing wind, and that’s the comparison he made with Dorothy Sayers. A… Read more »

Arguing with God

  

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right,” C.S. Lewis states in “The Shocking Alternative” chapter of Mere Christianity. He continues, “Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.” This, of course, leads to the question of why God made such a choice in… Read more »

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 »

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 »

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 »